to go into these subsidiary measures in detail, but shall merely glance at a few of the most important of them and

1. We adhere to the opinion we have so often expressed, that, first and foremost, England ought to have freedom of banking, or, at least, as near an approach to it as is enjoyed by Scotland. Had the experiment never been tried, the question between freedom and restriction would be undoubtedly decided by abstract reasoning in favour of the former; but when a long course of experience has accumulated an irresistible mass of facts on the same side of the argument-when we see freedom in one part of Great Britain giving rise to a sound, cheap, and sufficient currency, with which a thriving trade and unrivalled agricultural improvements have been carried on, unchecked by any reverses attributable to the state of their own money-market-while interference, in another division of the same country, has brought in its train constant fluctuations in prices, uncertainty in all productive occupations, general want of confidence, alternations of extreme scarcity and dangerous abundance of money, a depressed agriculture, and multiplied bankruptcies in trade, together with the occasional failure of some sixty or seventy banks in a fortnight, followed by a crash of credit, threatening the subversion of all the existing arrangements of society-in presence of these practical proofs of the relative advantages of the two systems, it does appear strange that any reasonable person, however averse to confuse himself with the theories of either, should hesitate between the two. What is there in the character of Englishmen that unfits them for being trusted to trust each other to the same extent as the Scotch? Time and dearly-bought experience must surely by this time have opened the eyes of all to the enormous mischiefs of our narrow, fettered, and monopolycrippled banking system; and the same sure test has proved the security and efficiency of the open, free, and broad principle on which banks in the north are allowed to establish themselves. Through this Scotland has enjoyed a regular and abundant supply of the circulating medium in all its transactions, and in its remotest districts. The banker there is allowed to deal in a cheaper article than gold, and the profit that he obtains enables him to give a salutary credit to those around him. There is no farmer in Scotland, at all respectable in character and connexion, who cannot obtain a bank credit to some amount, which precludes the necessity of disposing of his produce at an unfavourable period, or of turning off his labourers till he has some grain fit to carry to market. All his surplus cash, too, as he collects it, to meet his rent-day or any other payment, instead of being unprofitably, and perhaps insecurely, locked up in his own desk, is deposited in perfect safety in the bank, whence he receives it when wanted, with

the

the addition of interest. Give the English farmer the same opportunity, and he will be able to employ more labour and cultivate his farm far more thoroughly than at present. Most of the witnesses before the Lords' Committee, acquainted with agricultural business, declared their opinions that the greater number of farms in England are imperfectly cultivated, and the labourers unemployed for want of sufficient capital among the farmers; and that even at the prices of the last three or four years, much additional labour might, and would be profitably laid out on the land, if the farmers could command the money necessary for paying the men on the Saturday night. How is it that agriculturists experience a deficiency of money for these purposes? Because the facilities which the banks once afforded them have been withdrawn, through the effect of the existing restrictions on the circulation. A farmer in England is now obliged to have a double capital-one fixed in his stock and crops, the other floating in money, with which to pay his labourers' wages and his rent. In Scotland the farmer pays his outgoings for rent and wages with the notes which the banker lends him on the credit of his stock, crops, and securities: so that farming capital in Scotland will go nearly twice as far as in England; and it is not too much to say, that the establishment of a similar system of banking in England would almost double the efficiency of every respectable farmer's capital-and, in consequence, afford a vast stimulus to the employment of agricultural Jabourers.

2. We need scarcely repeat in this place the arguments we have so long urged in proof of the urgent necessity for a thorough reform in the vicious mode of administering the poor-laws in the southern counties. We must bring back the law of relief to the simple and wise statute of Elizabeth.

3. We must have a General Inclosure Act, which should enable the majority, or a certain proportion of the persons interested, to obtain an inclosure of a part, or the whole of the waste land of any parish, by application to the court of Quarter Sessions; this would, it cannot be doubted, occasion the cultivation of many strips and patches of land now lying waste, because, though they might repay the cost of inclosure and cultivation, they are neither sufficiently fertile nor extensive to repay that, and the 600l. or 7007. which an act of parliament costs, into the bargain. Under such an act, numerous spots of waste land would probably be very soon lotted out, and brought into the market; and it would be highly desirable that parish vestries should be allowed the power of purchasing and locating upon such spots of land any of their ablebodied labourers for whom they cannot find employment. Such is the desire to become possessed of land, that we are confident arrangements might be made by the overseers with paupers of this description

description for the ultimate repayment, by instalments, of the expenses of their location, the debt remaining as a lien on the land until paid off. We do not share the fears of those who expect families located in this way to multiply and deteriorate in condition till they resemble the Irish cottiers. In the first place, we consider multiplication to be in itself no evil at all, since the excess may, by precautionary measures of the simplest character, be always directed to spots where they can maintain themselves in comfort;-in the next, we are quite certain that the English pauper, who is paid for his children at per head, marries and multiplies now much faster than he is likely to do when placed in circumstances of industrious independence, in which caution and foresight will be for his immediate interest.

4. In spite of all Professor Senior's ingenuities (of which more anon) we must have an Irish Poor-Law.

But in conjunction with these several important measures, we repeat that a permanent and general scheme of colonization is necessary to allow this country to avail itself to the full of the vast resources which are at its disposal for the maintenance of its increasing population. Nothing, we are persuaded, is wanting but candid and patient enquiry to remove the prejudices and air of ridicule with which this subject has been unfortunately surrounded, and to convince the public of its paramount importance to the interests of individuals, of communities, and of mankind at large. Magna est veritas et prævalebit. The clouds we have alluded to are fast clearing away, and we look forward with sanguine hope to the time when the noble scheme of a systematic emigration from all the overpeopled parts of the earth to the under-peopled, preserving health to the mother countries by moderate depletion, and invigorating infant colonies by the infusion of full-grown labour, will be carried into general adoption by all civilized states; when no European writer on population will think of choosing such a motto as we have recently met with:

O voice, once heard

Delightfully, increase and multiply!

Now death to hear! for what can we increase

Or multiply, but penury, woe, and crime?'-Par. Lost. and when, with reference to the state and prospects of our own land, no meditative Coleridge shall be tempted to quote with prophetic melancholy the awful words of Holy Writ:- The burden of the valley of vision, even the burden upon the crowned isle, whose merchants are princes, whose traffickers the honourable of the earth; who stretcheth out her hand over the sea, and she is the mart of nations.'*

* Isaiah xxiii. See Coleridge on Church and State, (Second Edition, 1830,) p. 73. Авт.

ART. IV.-A Letter to Lord Howick on a Legal Provision for the Irish Poor, &c. By Nassau W. Senior, Esq., Professor of Political Economy in King's College. London. 1831.

IS

S the land of Ireland incapable of supplying a sufficiency of subsistence to all its inhabitants? This is the question that ought to take the lead in all arguments as to the propriety of a legal provision to secure the population of Ireland from famine. Let the custom-houses of Bristol, London, and Liverpool, answer the interrogation! Most imperfectly as Ireland is as yet cultivatedwith half of her fertile soil unreclaimed, and half of her ablebodied population unemployed-she yet exports provisions to the amount of six or seven millions of pounds in yearly value. Yes! a country the bulk of whose population is insufficiently supplied with the coarsest kind of food, annually sends away from her shores that enormous quantity of the very produce of her land, for want of which her own population are dying by inches, their lives shortened-as is proved by the mean duration of life in that country as compared to England-to one-fourth of their natural erm! How are we to explain the fearful paradox? For whose advantage is it that this mass of food leaves the country before the pressing wants of its inhabitants are half satisfied? For that of those whom the law invests with the ownership of the land. But the right of the inhabitants of a country to be permitted to earn a maintenance from it, if they can, by their own exertions, is a sacred right. Such, undoubtedly, must have been the view taken by Blackstone of the right of the poor to relief, when he declares a legal provision for the purpose to be dictated by the principles of society;' and it is precisely that of Paley, who asserts that, besides the claims of the poor upon our compassion, they have one likewise on our justice, founded upon the laws of nature, which he thus explains:

All things were originally common. No one being able to produce a charter from Heaven, had any better title to any particular possession than his next neighbour. There were reasons for mankind's agreeing upon a separation of the common fund; and God, for these reasons, is presumed to have ratified it. But this separation was made and consented to upon the expectation and condition that every one should have left a sufficiency for his subsistence, or the means of procuring it. ... And, therefore, when this partition of property is rigidly maintained against the claims of indigence and distress, it is maintained in opposition to the intentions of those who made it, and to His who is the supreme proprietor of everything, and who has filled the world with plenteousness for the sustentation and comfort of all whom he sends into it.'-Moral Philosophy.

The Malthusian doctrine, on the other hand, denies the right of any human being to be preserved from starving out of the superfluity

perfluity of the rich, upon the ground that the acknowledgment of such a right must produce more general evil than its denial. This is, at least, putting the question in a shape in which it can be fairly tried by reasoning. It is not denied by these persons, that, should their arguments prove incorrect, and the preponderance of evil be proved to accompany the refusal, not the concession, of legal relief, the right to it, and the expediency of granting it, would be established: and to meet them, it might be quite enough to say, that, in order to support this doctrine, its advocates have been obliged to insist that there is no room in the world for any greater number of human beings than are actually quartered upon it; or, at least, that the means which the globe affords to mankind for providing themselves with subsistence are so nearly exhausted, and the prospect of arriving at the ultimate limit when the world will refuse to maintain one additional individual, so imminent, as to make it absolutely necessary to begin immediately to check their increase at any cost. And this is said while certainly not onetenth, perhaps not one-hundredth, part of the cultivable portion of the globe is yet cultivated at all, and not one-hundredth part of that cultivated in any but the rudest manner, even according to our present lights upon agriculture! We, in this generation, who are personally acquainted with Mr. Malthus and his disciples, know that they have upheld this portentous doctrine in pure singleness of heart, and in complete (though wonderful) ignorance of its inherent folly, falsehood, cruelty, and injustice; that they have, in truth, condemned charity only out of ardent affection for their fellow-creatures, and inculcated the starvation of the poor from abstract benevolence of disposition; that they meant to be cruel only to be kind ;'-but we are much mistaken if posterity will ever give credit to this, or believe that the Malthusian argument against poor-laws was other than a deeply-laid conspiracy of the wealthy, the powerful, and the hard-hearted, to escape the just claims of the poor, under shelter of hired sophistries, too flimsy to impose upon themselves.

It will not do for any of the opponents of poor-laws to declare, that they only deny the resources of a limited country to maintain an increased population, and not of the globe at large; because what country is necessarily limited in the range to which her population may resort for food? If her own territory is fully occupied, can she not send the increase of her children to people and cultivate other unoccupied lands, and is she justified in starving them at home, like a niggardly stepmother, in order to avoid the trifling expense of portioning them abroad? But still less would such an excuse palliate the opposition of the anti-populationists to the establishment of a poor-law in Ireland-Ireland