Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/224

 not be disproved by the imperfect statistics of the time. Young has to meet their jeremiads by rather conjectural figures, as well as by his own observations of growing prosperity on all sides. His views are often oddly different from those which came up with the next generation. He denounces the poor-laws partly on the familiar ground that they are demoralising incentives to idleness. But he hates them still more because they were, as he puts it, 'framed in the very spirit of depopulation.' He reckons it as one of the great advantages of Ireland that the absence of poor-laws encourages a rapid increase of the numbers of the people. No one could speak more warmly of the importance of improving the condition of the poor in Ireland and elsewhere, but he has no thought of the dangers which alarmed Malthus and the later economists. The one merit of the old poor-laws according to them was that the parishes had an interest in checking the growth of the population. That, according to Young, was the cardinal vice of the system. The great aim of the statesman should be an increase of population. The way to increase population is to take all fetters from industry. Cultivate waste lands; turn Salisbury