Page:Malthus 1807 A letter to Samuel Whitbread.djvu/10

 from every quarter where it can be attained; and though you are little likely to be unduly biassed either by authorities or numbers, yet that you stand on too high ground to be afraid of retracting or modifying any proposition which you may afterwards see reason to think would not be attended with the effects which it appeared at first to promise.

The experience of the last two hundred years, and the circumstances which have called for the present bill, are convincing proofs, that in the establishment of a satisfactory provision for the poor, the efforts of the ablest legislators have been repeatedly foiled. That the cause of these reiterated failures is to be found in those principles which I have endeavoured to explain in the Work to which you have referred, is a truth of which I feel the fullest confidence; but I am very far indeed from the presumption of supposing that the plan which I there suggested,