Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/92

 Southey can hardly mention Malthus without foaming at the mouth. That was because 'Malthus' meant for him the doctrine that vice and disease were necessary checks to population; and that the only way to suppress poverty was to leave the poor man to starve. He denounced the 'manufacturing system' even in his early writings, as the great source of evil, because it meant the breaking up of the old social bonds, the growth of a vast 'proletariat,' and the conditions under which the rich become richer and the poor poorer, or, as he puts it, the capitalists, like pike in a fish-pond, eat up the smaller fish. He attacks Pitt (absurdly enough) as responsible for the cruelties inflicted upon children in factories, and Lord Shaftesbury, when he took up the factory legislation, wrote to Southey, as a disciple to one of his chief teachers. Macaulay supposes that Southey thinks well of Owen, simply because Owen was 'more unreasonably and hopelessly in the wrong than any speculator of our time.' Southey's sympathy meant really (as many of his letters show) that he held that Owen, in spite of some shocking opinions and chimerical hopes, was at least attacking the great social evil—the spreading cancer of pauperism. Now that we have 'all become Socialists,' we can