Page:Malthus 1807 A letter to Samuel Whitbread.djvu/33

 you have yourself expressed; but the cause of it is not sufficiently removed by your Bill. You recommend that these tenements should be let at the highest rents that are offered, in order that the property of those landlords who have cottages on their estates may not be materially injured by an unfair competition. But as the parishes must have a discretionary power in letting their cottages, and are indeed expressly permitted, if they see reason, to allow of their being inhabited without rent; it does not appear to me that it will be possible to keep up the rents of these cottages to their necessary, or, as Dr. Smith calls it, their natural rates; and the landholders being thus completely discouraged from building—fresh cottages, or perhaps even from repairing their old ones, we should in time see the greater part of our villages consisting of parish tenements, as well as the greater part of our labouring glasses dependent on parish relief.