The reverse of this maxim, it should seem, ought to be received. Poverty is an enormous evil. By poverty I understand the state of a man possessing no permanent property, in a country where wealth and luxury have already gained a secure establishment.

/He then that is born to poverty, may be said, under another name, to be born a slave./

A boy of a thoughtful and reflecting turn, will frequently look forward in this respect to the state of manhood, with an aching heart. Now, he will exclaim, I am maintained by the industry of others; I am freed from all solicitude about the supply of to-morrow. But hereafter I shall be told, You shall not have the necessaries of the day without the labour of the day; "He that will not work, neither shall he eat*." His state in several respects resembles the prophetic denunciation of Jesus Christ to the apostle Peter: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, When thou wast young, thou girdedst thyself, and walkedst whither thou wouldest: but when thou shalt be old, thou shalt stretch forth thy hauds, and another shall gird thee, and carry thee whither thou wouldest not f." In reality however, the child and the adult are both slaves in different ways: when we put on the manly gown, we only change one species of despot for another.

* II Thess. Chap. iii, ver. 10. + John, Chap. xxi, ver. 18.

But, it will be asked, is not the complaint here recited, unreasonable and unjust? Is any man entitled to claim through life, that he should be maintained by the industry of others?

Certainly not. The injustice I suffer, is not in the actual labour, but in the quantity of that labour. If no man were absolutely compelled to perform a greater share of labour than, multiplied by the number of members in the community, was necessary for the subsistence of the community, he would have no right to complain on that account. But the labour then required, would be diminished to a tenth, perhaps a twentieth part of the labour now imposed upon the husbandman and artificer*.

The evil of poverty principally consists of the following particulars: leaving out of the enumeration the frequently experienced insufficiency of labour to maintain the poor; the usual accident of men's being thrust out of their customary train of industry and resource for bread, by the fluctuations of society; and the want of a suitable provision for sickness, infirmity and age.

We will confine ourselves to points of more universal application.

First, the abridgment of life, and privation of the enjoyments of life.

* Political Justice, Book VIII, Chap. VI, octavo edition.

H

As to the abridgment of life we are scarcely competent judges, since wealth, expended in sensuality and indulgence, is scarcely less hostile to the protraction of existence. Every one can see however, that inordinate labour produces untimely decrepitude. Every one can conceive the varieties of pain and disease, which accrue from the restraint of our limbs, the intemperate exercise of the muscles, and a continual exposure to the inclemency of the seasons.

That the poor are peculiarly subjected to a privation of the enjoyments of life, and obliged to content themselves for the greater part of their existence with that negative happiness which consists in the absence of pain, is a point too evident to need illustration.

Secondly, the poor are condemned to a want of that leisure which is necessary for the improvement of the mind. They are the predestinated victims of ignorance and prejudice. They are compelled for the most part to rank with those creatures, that exist only for a few years, and then are as if they had never been. They merely vegetate. The whole of the powers they possess, is engaged in the pursuit of miserable expedients to protract their existence. Whatever be the prejudice, the weakness or the superstition of their age and country, they have scarcely any chance to escape from it. It is melancholy to reflect, how

few moments they can have of complacence, of exultation, of honest pride, or of joy. Theirs is a neutral existence. They go forward with their heads bowed down to the earth, in a mournful state of inanity and torpor. Yet, like the victims of Circe, they have the understanding left ever and anon to afford them a glimpse of what they might have been. In this respect they are more unfortunate than the beasts.

Thirdly, even those who escape from the general sentence of ignorance, are haunted with the ills of poverty in another shape. Leisure well employed is the most invaluable benefit that can fall to the lot of man. If they have had leisure to accumulate the rudiments of knowledge, they have not the leisure to construct them. Even if their immediate avocation have something in it analogous to the cultivation of intellect, still they are not carried whither they would, but whither they would not. Wherever almost we find the records of talents and genius, we find a man impelled by accident, hurried by necessity, and the noblest conceptions of his mind rendered abortive by the ills of fortune. There is no plant that requires to be so assiduously tended, and so much favoured by every incidental and subordinate circumstance, as the effusions of fancy, and the discoveries of science.

While such appear to me the genuine effects

of poverty, never will I insult the sacred presence of its victims, by telling them that poverty is no evil!

Hence also we may be led to perceive the mistake of those persons who affirm, that the wants which are of the first necessity, are inconsiderable, and are easily supplied.

No; that is not inconsiderable, which cannot be purchased but by the sacrifice of the best part of my time, and the first fruit of my labours.

This is the state of society at the period in which I am born into the world. I cannot remedy the evil, and therefore must submit to it. I ought to work up my mind to endure it with courage; I should yield with a chearful and active temper to the inequality of my burthen; but it is neither necessary nor desirable that I should be insensible to the true state of the case.

Addison ludicrously exclaims in his tragedy of Cato:

What pity 'tis

That we can die but once to serve our country!

If the condition of human life corresponded indeed with this patriotic wish, a man might content himself to pass through one of its repetitions under the pressure of great disadvantages. But, when we recollect that we appear but once upon this theatre, that our life is short and precarious, that we rise