earth. The funds which support it are injurious to no class: they cannot be destroyed or lessened: their existence and increase are secured by the same unfailing laws which regulate those unequal returns which the varied surface of the earth must ever make to the labours bestowed upon it. The enduring interests of the landed proprietors are thus indissolubly bound up and connected with the means, the enterprise, and the success of the agricultural capitalists. Temporary advantages in their bargains with their tenantry, or in their arrangements with the state, are to them objects necessarily of inferior, sometimes of only illusory benefit. The fortunes, the station, the comparative influence and means of their order, are always therefore best guarded and preserved by them, when, keeping aloof from all that may embroil or hinder the general progress of the nation in wealth and skill, they use their individual influence, and their political functions, to promote such systems only of national policy and finance as are just and moderate; likely, therefore, to be steady and durable, and to leave a free course to those wholesome causes which promote their own peculiar interests, only as identified with those of the nation.'-pp. 309–323. In taking our leave of Mr. Jones, he will not suspect us of undervaluing his work, after the full extracts we have made from it, if we recommend him, in any future edition, to condense his arguments, several of which are many times repeated, not in substance only, but almost in the same words. Perhaps also it may with some reason be objected, that while devoting an entire volume to the subject of rents, he should have confined himself exclusively to the rent of land, and omitted all special mention of that large class of rents which arise from buildings of every kind, mines, quarries, turf-bogs, appropriated fisheries, &c. No doubt these follow the same laws as the rent of land, being determined by the extent of the demand, as compared with the supply, which is more or less affected by monopoly. But there are some striking distinctions; and, in a practical review of rents, it is strange that this class should have been overlooked. We anticipate much information from the promised dissertations on wages, profits, and taxation, which are to form the matter of the remaining books of the work. But we have also our misgivings as to the mode in which the author intends to treat some of the important questions these subjects involve. We hope we are mistaken in the inference we have drawn from several passages in the present publication, that Mr. Jones has adopted the Malthusian doctrine of population, and that this will be the foundation of his opinions respecting the regulating cause of wages. We trust he does not intend to reproduce the trite fallacy of the wages of labour depending wholly on the prudence of the labourers themselves in limiting their own numbers-that doctrine which is still preached to them in the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, and of other persons laying equal claim to profound philosophy and extended philanthropy. The one great end and object of the extension of education is, indeed, by many of its principal advocates, declared to be the imparting to the labouring class a knowledge of this arcanum. We need not go over again, in this place, the arguments by which we have elsewhere shown the falsehood and the cruelty of this doctrine-its falsehood, because nothing can be more untrue than that the limitation of the numbers of any people is the only, or the rational way of rescuing them from misery; its cruelty, because it aims at depriving the poor of the principal source of happiness within their reach, the domestic affections; and because, as far as it succeeds in limiting the numbers of a people, so far it interferes with the enjoyment of the blessings of life by human beings, for whom Providence has prepared ample space and means of support, if philosophers and governments would but permit them, in obedience to His command, to increase and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue the uttermost parts of it to their purposes. We call upon Mr. Jones, and such as still persist in this delusion, to recollect that the real wages of the mass of any population must depend on the quantity of the necessaries of life (chiefly food) they can obtain by their labour; that if they cannot obtain a full and complete sufficiency at home, we know that they can obtain an abundance abroad, either by carrying out their stout muscles, with the skill and knowledge for applying them to advantage, which, in most civilized countries, but particularly in this, give man such an immense command over nature, to other lands of luxuriant fertility, yet lying waste, whence they can procure supplies of necessaries far beyond their wants; or, by employing these same powers at home in the production of articles which they can exchange for the means of comfortable subsistence with the inhabitants of other more fertile countries, who are possessed of a redundancy of them;-in two words, by emigration or importation of food in exchange for manufactures. If then any population does experience a deficiency of the means of subsistence, it can only be that one or both of these two great and sure avenues of supply are closed against it by the imperfect or mistaken arrangements of the government, which must either have placed impediments in the way of the free exchange of manufactures (that is, of labour) for food, or neglected to assist the redundant labourers to follow the demand for labour wherever it exists over the world-a pursuit which their poverty alone disables them from spontaneously undertaking without assistance. VOL. XLVI. NO. XCI. I Το To advance such assistance, is as clearly and decidedly the duty of a government as it is to establish those laws for the security of property and the maintenance of order, which prevent the starving labourer from relieving himself, though at the expense of others. In early ages, and in the infancy of civilization, when the skill, inventive powers, and resources of man were at so low an ebb, that his daily toil could scarcely extract, even from the most fertile soils, more than a sufficiency for his daily support, there might have been some apparent, though certainly no just, reason for urging the restraint of his numbers; but since we know that his natural tendency to increase is not a whit greater now than it was at that time, but, on the other hand, that the means in his power of subduing the soil and supplying himself thence with the necessaries and comforts of life, have been multiplied many fold, and rendered incomparably more productive, by the innumerable contrivances which his ingenuity has brought to the aid of his natural powers, it is something too much to say, that in civilized countries, and in this, above all others, the means of man for procuring subsistence still fall short of meeting his tendency to increase in numbers! But indeed, why should we trouble ourselves at all with vague generalities, and questions about tendencies? The argument may be brought within very narrow limits. Take any definite number of men, with their families, from a country highly advanced in civilization, like this, and place them in a country like Canada or New South Wales, having an immense extent of virgin soils. Will any one dispute that they can, through the skill, ingenuity, and knowledge of the arts of improved production which they bring with them, provide subsistence enough, after the expiration of a twelvemonth, not only to support themselves, but to meet every possible increase in their numbers for an indefinite period of time? Will any one deny, that they can produce a surplus beyond this, sufficient, in a very few years, to repay the cost of transporting them from the mother-country, providing them with tools and seed, and maintaining them until their first crops are grown? Lastly, will any one deny that there is an abundance of capital of the kind required for this object, in this country, or accessible to the capitalists of this country, ready to be advanced upon sufficient security, and imploring such or any employment? Nor can it be said that this employment of capital would, in any degree, diminish the fund left in the mother-country for the employment of the remaining labour there, because the capital required for this purpose is less, much less, than what is now unproductively consumed here in keeping the surplus population in idleness; and because, even if this were not so, the opening of a new a new avenue for the profitable employment of capital in the colonies, by increasing the demand for it at home, would cause an immediate influx of an equal quantity from abroad, or, what comes to the same thing, a stoppage of the actual efflux of capital now going on from this to other countries, through the medium of the European stock market, which maintains the equilibrium between the supply and demand of capital, just as the Stock Exchange maintains the equilibrium between the supply and demand for the precious metals. And again, if this were not enough, the vacuum would be speedily filled up by the accumulation of new capital, owing to the increased opportunities of employing it to advantage. So that nothing can be more unfounded than the notion (unhappily but too prevalent among those who make a pretence of reasoning upon these subjects), that the abstraction of any quantity of capital from this country for the settlement of its surplus population in the colonies, would permanently, or even temporarily, diminish the fund for the employment of the remaining part of the population at home. If these positions cannot be denied and we do not see how they can, by any one at all acquainted with the redundant condition both of capital and labour in Britain, and with the equally abundant resources for profitably employing that capital and labour in her colonies-it may be taken as proved, that the increase of population may, by prudent and well-conducted arrangements on the part of government (for it is the government alone that can either offer the necessary securities for the advance of the capital, or take the requisite securities for its repayment by the settlers or their employers, or the parishes at home that wish to get rid of them)-may, we repeat, be supported in comfort and abundance, either at home, or in colonial settlements, to any extent to which it can take place. And, consequently, not only does all necessity for checking such increase vanish, but the attempt to impose any check whatever upon it appears in the light of a most impolitic neglect of the means of increasing the wealth and population of the empire to an almost unbounded extent, and a wanton annihilation of an immense mass of possible happiness, an odious and criminal interference to intercept the blessings of this life provided by the bounty of Heaven, and, may we not add, of a future existence also, from an extended and eventually almost unlimited number of human beings? Should any of our readers think that in this, or in former papers on congenerous subjects, we have dwelt with unnecessary harshness on the mistaken views of the political economists, and that we might have exposed their errors and inconsistencies without employing expressions indicative of contempt or repugnance (if I 2 such such have escaped us) towards a class of reasoners, who, doubtless, like ourselves, pursued the inquiry after truth in the best way they could, according to their capacities, and free from suspicion of intentional mischief,-we intreat them to recollect that the writers in question stand convicted, not merely of errors, but of crimes; for surely the publication of opinions taken up hastily upon weak, narrow, and imperfect evidence-opinions which, overthrowing, as they did, the fundamental principles of sympathy and common interest that knit society together, could not but be deeply injurious even if true,-does amount to crime. It may truly be said of these writers, Nihil quod tetigerunt non inquinavere.' In blundering the different subjects that have passed through their hands-rent, profits, wages, population, and morals— they have not merely erred, they have invariably, and with an unhappy pertinacity in error, erred on the wrong, on the most mischievous side. In their theory of rent, they have insisted that landlords can thrive only at the expense of the public at large, and especially of the capitalists: in their theory of profits, they have declared that capitalists can only improve their circumstances by depressing those of the labouring and most numerous class in their theory of wages, they have maintained that the condition of the labourers can only be bettered by depriving them of their greatest happiness and their only consolation under trouble, the feelings of the husband and the father: in their theory of population, they have absolved governments from all responsibility for the misery of the people committed to their care: and in their theory of morals, they have impressed on the poor, that the legitimate indulgence of their natural affections is the greatest of all crimes,-on the rich, that the abandonment of the poor to destitution is the most sacred of all duties. In one and all of their arguments they have studiously exhibited the interests of every class in society as necessarily at perpetual variance with those of every other class! And are the perverse and unwearied propagators of such doctrines as these, happily as false as they are mischievous, but surely no less mischievous than false, to be exempted from reproof? Must the same bland and gentle suavity of correction be applied to them with which the harmless reveries of a Bentham may be with safety noticed? Could they shut their eyes to the fatal tendency of their own arguments? Were they not bound to sift and examine their accuracy with the most cautious and painstaking anxiety, and pause long before they published, literally ex cathedrâ, and, in the tone of oracular authority, recommended for the guidance of legislators and statesmen, principles which, if credited by the public, would place all its classes in perpetual and deadly hostility; and, if acted upon |