Page:Malthus 1807 A letter to Samuel Whitbread.djvu/39

 operation of your Bill. It is your object, and I trust that of the nation, to diminish the proportion of dependent poverty, and not to increase it; but the specific evil which I fear from your bill, as it stands at present, is an increase of it.

I should most earnestly recommend, that, at all events, one or other of the two Clauses which I have particularly noticed should be given up. If parishes be empowered to build cottages, the rates should continue on the land as the only adequate check to their increase. Or if all capital be made rateable, no new power of building tenements should be given to parishes, but every thing be left as before to individual interest and exertion.

It would certainly be most desirable to improve the cottages of the poor throughout the kingdom; and no mode of active beneficence could be pointed out to the proprietors of land,