with the Whig ministry, coupled with this act, stands as a tolerably good proof of the insincerity of the Whigs, who, to a man, at the last elections for Middlesex as well as Westminster, represented Sir Francis Burdett as being every thing short of a downright traitor, and as aiming, at the very least, to overturn the kingly government of England Gentlemen, all offences against ourselves are to be forgiven, the moment we are convinced of the contrition of the offender; and, though we are justified in being more slow to forgive offences committed against our country, those offences too ought to be freely forgiven, but not until the offender has produced a security that he will offend no more. But, in both cases, there are some offences, which can never be forgotten; and, of this class was the wicked and base handle, which the Whigs made of the phrase, the best of kings." Oh! it were indeed a reproach to you to forget the interpretation which Mr. Byng and others pat upon this phrase! That interpretation, that out-cry, still baser than the out-cry of popery," was used by the time-serving Whigs for the purpose of ingratiating themselves with the adherents of Pitt, for which they have been most justly punished, and that, too, by the intrigues of that very faction. How careful was Mr. Byng to disclaim all connection, all community even of wishes, with Sir Francis Burdett ! He, good loyal gentleman, said, that he was these topics, Mr. Sheridan has, if his speeches have been truly reported, tåken a most foul advantage of his lordship, who, as to subscriptions, complained of the manner in which Mr. Sheridan' was supported at the last election, a complaint which his crafty adversary has endeavoured to represent as an implied censure upon your present subscription. But Gentlemen, you certainly have not overlooked the wide distinction here to be drawn? Mr. Sheridan's election was supported by a secret subscription of PEERS OF PARLIAMENT, several of whom were, at the same time, servants of the king, receiving large salaries out of the public purse, and, of course, engaged in carrying on an election against the people with the people's money, to which must be added, that peers of parliament are, by that constitution, for the preservation of which we are called on 66 to spend our last shilling and shed the last "drop of our blood," strictly prohibited from interfering, either directly or indirectly, in the elections of members of the House of Commons; and, if, to pay money for the purpose of keeping out one man and of bringing in another; if this be not in-terfering in such elections, the prohibition can be considered as nothing more than one of those numerous nominal securities, by which the people have been so long deluded. Your subscription, on the contrary, is prohibited by no law or usage. You have been openly invited to subscribe. The list of subscribers shuns the inspection of man. You are not servants of the crown; and, it is your own money that you give, which, if necessary to the preservation of your rights, it is full as much, at least, your duty to give, as it is your duty to pay any sum, in any shape whatever, for the purpose of keeping an enemy from your shores. Lord Cochrane, therefore, when he complained of the subscription, by which the election of Mr. Sheridan was supported, conveyed, you must clearly perceive, not the smallest censure of that subscription, which has now been entered into by you. firmly attached to the constitution, and that he affectionately loved the best of kings," turning, while he uttered the words, his sapient eyes towards Sir Francis. "The best of kings has now most justly rewarded Mr. Byng and his faction; and, that very magistrate, John Bowles, whom they left in quict possession of all his offices and emoluments, apparently for no other reason than that he, in conjunction with his bosom associate, Redhead, were the notorious calumniators of Sir Franeis Burdett, has now been the principal instrument of bringing the long possessed seat of Mr. Byng into jeopardy! Well done John! Holloo John! Hunt them with thy vice-scenting nose; tear them, good John, with thy worshipful fangs, and scratch, at last, a hole for them in that collection of incomparable rubbish, thy Anti-" Jacobin Review! There are two other topics, Gentlemen, upon which I must say a few words by way of comment on Mr. Sheridan's speeches; the propriety of carrying on an election by subscription, and the expressions of my Lord Cochrane with respect to Mr. For. Upon As to Lord Cochrane's expressions with respect to Mr. Fox, they were, as nearly as I have been able to discover, these: "that "Mr. Fox in himself, was, or would have been, an honour to his country; but, "that you should take great care not to bestow your confidence on those, of "whom there had been many, who were attached only to the baser part of Mr. "Fox." Taking advantage of the cry, excited by these words, amongst some dozen or two of his own scene-shifters, or of those unthinking beings, who are led merely by the sound of names, Mr. Sheridan has made several efforts to excite a prejudice against Lord Cochrane, who gave you most wholesome advice, and who said, or insinuated, nothing, except in praise of Mr. Fox, which can with truth be denied Observe, too, that the mention of Mr. Fox originated, not with his lordship, but with Mr. Sheridan, who had, with true theatrical address, introduced that name for the purpose of exciting in you compassion to vards himself, whom he took care to represent as the faithful follower and bosom friend of the beloved deceased. Well; let us meet him upon this ground; and, then let us ask, what Mr Fox did for us. Before he came into power, he solemnly declared, that he never would hold a place as a minister, until the parliament had been reformed; he came into place, and never did he utter the word reform afterwards, but, on the contrary, set his face against all those who endeavoured to bring about a correction of even notorious abuses; he was the man, who, as his very first ministerial act, brought in a bill for enabling one of his colleagues in office to hold a large sinecure place, which, by law, was incompatible with the active office he then had been promoted too; he, who had, only the year before, complained that the minister, Pitt, would, by degrees, take away all the income of the people, because he proposed to add a sixth to the Income-tax, defended, as soon as he was in office, a bill which raised that same tax to ten per centum; he, who had for so many years been complaining against the influence of the crown, was one of those who brought in the bill for adding to the Pensions of the Royal Family, at the same time that, by another act, the King's Property in the Funds, under whatever name invested, was exempted from the Incometax, aud that, too, at a time when Mr Fox declared, that it was impossible to lay a new tax without affecting the prosperity of the nation in some way or other; he, who had, upon every occasion that offered, all his life long, reprobated the introduction of foreign troops, did, amongst his first acts as a minister, give his sanction to a bill for adding to the ten thousand foreign troops then in this country; he, who had all his life long contended against unnecessary wars, and especially wars for the sake of Hanover, did, in his very first published dispatch, declare, that he should advise the king never to make peace for England, except upon the condition of Hanover being restored; he, who, upon numberless occasions, had asserted, that all the calamities and disgrace of this country were the work of the minister Pitt, gave a vote for making the people of that same country pay the debts of that same minister Pitt, and, that, too, expressly upon the score of his merits; he was a sinecure place-man, doubly-blessed, from his cradle to his grave, and he, upon more than one occasion, contended, in parliament, that it was unconstitutional to lessen the number of patent places, which he asserted to be private proberty as much as house and land.- -These, Gentlemen, are a part of the things which Mr Fox did for us; and, as I told you in my second or third letter, if this be the sort of representative that suits you, the honour of representing you, would, in no case, be coveted by me. But, it is not so. You have opened your eyes. You have seen, that, for too long a time, names, and not principles, had been your guide; and yon have now resolved, despising alike Whiggism and Toryism, to ask, who will act most justly by the country? The intention of Mr. Sheridan evidently is to wheedle you back into that state which exhibited you as the mere tools of the government, on one side, and of the great families on the other side, who, together, by the means of a quiet compromise, left you no more of the real freedom of election than is exercised by the electors of Old Sarum. From this degraded state you have manfully risen to the assertion and exercise of your rights; but, this honourable change you owe not to Mr. Fox, while to Mr. Sheridan you owe every means that he was able to use to prevent that change. The former contentedly suffered the minister of the day to give him his colleague; and, as to the latter, after having completely inveigled you into an election of Lord Percy, conducted as quietly as that of Gatton, or of Ryegate; he coalesced with Sir Samuel Hood, joined hand and heart with those who were your bitterest enemies, and who had been the bitterest enemies of Fox himself, in order to subdue you by force. Judge, therefore, Gentlemen, whether Mr. Sheridan be a fit person for the colleague of Sir Francis Burdett; or whe ther you ought to leave him to the support of the play-actors, scene-shifters, and policerunners, marshalled under that respectable matron, whom he brought as a witness against his electioneering friends, Messrs. Weatherhead and Drake.Of Mr. Fox I never seek to say harm; but, if challenged to speak, the truth must be spoken; and, the truth is, as Lord Cochrane evidently believes, that, though Mr. Fox was a man of rare and wonderful talents, though he was kind and generous in his nature, and though he loved his country most sincerely; yet that he had not, as Major Cartwright told him, the power to say nay to bad men,” and that that failing led him so to act as to render very little benefit to his country, while he notoriously gave countenance to many men, who did it great and lasting injury. That, henceforward, you may reject, with equal scorn, the appellation of Foxite, of Pittite, of Whig, or of Tory; that you may, in the exercise of your elective rights, be influenced by principles and not by names; and that your conduct, by becoming an example to electors in general, or a timely indication to the elected, may lead to a constitutional reform of the gross abuses that exist, and thereby produce the restoration of our liberties and ensure the safety of the throne, is the unfeigned wish of Your faithful friend SIR,This excellent saying of a great man was never more strictly applicable to any system than it is to Mr. Malthus s paradox, and his explanation of it. It seemed, on the first publication of the Essay on Population, as if the whole world was going to be turned topsy-turvy; all our ideas of moral good and evil were in a manner confounded, we scarcely knew whether we stood on our head or our heels; but, after exciting considerable expectation, giving us a good shake, and making us a little dizzy, Mr. M. dos, as we do when we shew the children London-sets us on our feet again, and every thing goes on as before. The common notions that prevailed on this subject, till our author's first population scheme tended to weaken them, were, that life is a blessing, and that the more people could be maintained in any state in a tolerable degree of health, comfort, and decency, the better: tha want and misery are not desirable in themselves, that famine is not to be courted for its own sake, that wars, disease, and pestilence are not what every friend of his coun-` try or his species should pray for in the first place: that vice in its different shapes is a thing that the world could do very well without, and that if it could be got rid of altogether, it would be a great gain. In short, that the object both of the moralist and politician, was to diminish as much as possible the quantity of vice and misery existing in the world; without apprehending that by thus effectually introducing more virtue and happiness, more reason and good sense, that by improving the manners of a people, removing pernicious habits and principles of acting, or securing greater plenty, and a greater number of mouths to partake of it, they were doing a disservice to humanity. Then comes Mr. M. with his octavo book, and tells us there is another great evil, which had never been found out, or at least not sufficiently attended to till his time; namely, excessive population; that this evil was infinitely greater and more to be dreaded than all the others put together; and that its approach could only be checked by vice and misery; that any increase of virtue or happiness was the direct way to hasten it on; and that in proportion as we attempted to improve the condition of mankind, and lessened the restraints of vice and misery, we threw down the only barriers that could detend us from this most formidable scourge of the species,-population. Vice and misery were indeed evils, but they were absolutely necessary evils; necessary to prevent the introduction of others of an incalculably and inconceivably greater magnitude; and that every proposal to lessen their actual quantity, on which the measure of our safety depended, might be attended with the most ruinous consequences, and ought to be looked upon with horror. I think, Sir, this description of the tendency and complexion of Mr. M.'s first Essay is not in the least exaggerated, but an exact and faithful picture of the impression which it made on every one's mind. After taking some time to recover from the surprise and hurry into which os great a discovery would naturally throw him, he comes forward again with a large quarto, in which he is at great pains both to say and unsay all that he had said in his former volume; and upon the whole concludes, that population is in itself a good thing, that it is never likely to do much harm, that virtue and happiness ought to be promoted by every practicable means, and that the most effectual as well as desirable check to excessive population is moral restraint. The mighty discovery thus reduced to, and pieced out by common sense, the wonder vanishes, and we breathe a little freely again. Mr. M. is however by no means willing to give up his old doctrine, or eat his own words: he stickles stoutly for it at times He has his fits of reason and his fits of extravagance, his yielding and his obstinate moments, fiuctuating between the two, and vibrating backs.. wards and forwards with a dexterity of selfcontradiction which it is wonderful to behold. The following passage is so curious in this respect that I cannot help quoting it in this place. Speaking of the reply of the author of the Political Justice to his former work, he observes, "But, Mr. Godwin says, that if he looks into the past history of the world, he does not see that increasing population has been controuled and confined by vice and misery alone. In this observation I cannot agree with him. I will thank Mr. Godwin to name to me any check that in past ages has contributed to keep down the population to the level of the means of subsistence, that does not fairly come under some form of vice or misery, except indeed the check of moral restraint, which I have mentioned in the course of this work; and which, to say the truth, whatever hopes we may entertain of its prevalence in future, has undoubtedly in past ages operated with very inconsiderable force. *" When I assure the reader that I give him this passage fairly and fully, I think he will be of opinion with me, that it would be difficult to produce an instance of a more miserable attempt to reconcile a contradiction by childish evasion, to insist upon an argument, and give it up in the same breath. Does Mr. M. really think that he has such an absolute right and authority over this subject of population, that, provided he mentions a principle, or shews that he is not ignorant of it, and cannot be caught napping by the critics, he is at liberty to say. that it has or has not had any operation, just as he pleases, and that the state of the fact is a matter of perfect indifference? He contradicts the opinion of Mr. G. that vice and misery are not the only checks to population, and gives as a proof of his assertion, that he himself truly has mentioned another check. Thus after flatly denying that moral restraint has any effect at all, he modestly concludes by saying that it has had some, no doubt, but promises that it will never have a great deal. Yet in the very next page he "On this sentiment, whether virtue, prudence, or pride, which I have already noticed under the name of moral restraint, or of the more comprehensive title, the preventive check, it will appear, that in the sequel of this work, I shall lay considerable stress," p. 385. This kind of reasoning is enough to give one the head says, The prevalence of this check may be estimated by the general proportion of virtue and happiness in the world, for if there had been no such check, there could have been nothing but vice and n isery. ache. But to take things in their order.The most singular thing in this singular performance of our author is, that it should have been originally ushered into the world as the most complete and only satisfactory answer to the speculations of Godwin, Condorcet and others, or to what has been called the modera philosophy. A more unaccountable piece of wrong-headedness, a total perversion of reason could hardly be devised by the wit of man. Whatever we may think of the doctrine of the progressive improvement of the human mind, or of a state of society in which every thing will be subject to the control of reason, however absurd, unnatural or impracticable, we may conceive such a system to be, certainly it cannot, without the grossest inconsistency, be ob jected to it, that such a system would necessarily be rendered abortive, because, if reason should ever get this mastery over all our actions, we should then be governed entirely by our physical appetites and passions, without the least regard to consequences. This appears to me a refinement on absurdity. Several philosophers and speculatists had supposed that a certain state of society, very different from any that has hitherto existed, was in itself practicable; and that if it were realised, it would be productive of a fir greater degree of human happiness than is compatible with the present institutions of society. I have nothing to do with either of these points. I will allow to any one who pleases that all such schemes are "false, sophistical, unfounded in the extreme." But, I cannot agree with Mr. Malthus that they would be bad in proportion as they were good; that the true and only unanswerable argument against all such schemes is that very degree of happiness, virtue, and improvement, to which they are supposed to give rise. And I cannot agree with him in this, because it is contrary to common sense, and leads to the subversion of every principle of moral reasoning. Without perplexing himself with the subtle arguments of his op-1 ponents, Mr. M. comes boldly forward, and says, Gentlemen, I am willing to make you large concessions. I am ready to allow the practicability and the desirableness of your schemes, the more desirable and the more practicable, the better; the more happiness, the more virtue, the more knowledge, the more refinement, the better; all these will only add to the exuberant strength of my argument. I have a short answer to all objections, (to be sure, I found it in an old political receipt-book, called Prospects, &c. by one Wallace, a man not much known, but no matter for that, finding is 7 keeping, you know:") and with one smart stroke of his wand, on which are inscribed certain mystical characters, and algebraic proportions, he levels the fairy enchantment with the ground. For, says Mr. M. though this improved state of society were actually realised, it could not possibly continue, but must soon terminate in a state of things pregnant with evils far more insupportable than any we at present endure, in consequence of the excessive population which would follow, and the impossibility of providing for its support. This is what I do not understand. It is, in other words, to assert that the doubling the population of a country, for example, after a certain period, will be attended with the most pernicious effects, by want, famine, bloodshed, and a state of general violence and confusion; that this will afterwards lead to vices and practices still worse than the physical evils they are designed to prevent, &c. and yet that at this period those who will be the most interested in preventing these consequences, and the best acquainted with the circumstances that lead to them, will neither have the understanding to foresee, nor the heart to feel, nor the will to prevent the sure evils, to which they expose themselves and others; though this advanced state of population, which does not admit of any addition without danger, is supposed to be the immediate result of a more general diffusion of the comforts and conveniences of life, of more enlarged and liberal views, of a more refined and comprehensive regard to our own permanent interests as well as those of others, of correspondent habits and manners, and of a state of things, in which our gross animal appetites will be under the constant control of reason. The influence of rational motives, of refined and long-sighted views of things is supposed to have taken place of narrow, selfish and nerely sensual motives: this is implied in the very statement of the question. "What conjuration and what mighty magic" should thus. blind our philosophical descendants on this single subject in which they are more interested than in all others, so that they should stand with their eyes open on the edge of a precipice, and instead of retreating from it, should throw themselves down headlong. I am unable to comprehend; unless indeed, we suppose that the impulse to propagate, the species is so strong and uncontroulable, that reason has no power over it. This is what Mr. M. was at one time strongly disposed to assert, and what he is at present half, inclined to retract. Without this foundation to rest on, the whole of his reasoning is utterly unintelligible. It seems to me a most preposterous way of answering a man who chuses to assert, that mankind are capable of being governed entirely by their reason, and that it would be better for them, if they were to say no; for, if they were go verned entirely by it, they would be much less able to attend to its dictates than they are at present; and the evils which would thus follow from the unrestrained increase of population, would be excessive. Almost every little miss who has had the advantage of a boarding-school education, or been properly.tutored by her mamma, whose hair is not of an absolute flame colour, and who has hopes in time, if she behaves prettily, of getting a good husband, waits patiently year after year, looks about her, rejects or trifies with half a dozen lovers, favouring one, laughing at another, "chusing among them, as one picks pears," saying, "This I like, that I loathe," with the greatest indifference, as if it were no such very pressing affair, and all the while behaves very prettily; till she is at last smitten with a handsome house, a couple of footmen in livery, or a black servant, or a coach with two sleek geldings, with which she is more taken than with her man. Why, what an idea does Mr. M. give us of the grave, masculine, genius of our Utopian philosophers, their sublime attainments, and gigantic energy, that they will not be able to manage these matters as decently and cleverly as the silliest women can do at present! Mr. M. indeed, endeavours to soften this absurdity by saying, that moral restraint at present owes its strength to selfish motives; what is this to this purpose? If Mr. M. chuses to say, that men wil always be governed by the same gross mechanical motives that they are at present, I have no objection to make to it; but it is shifting the question; it is not arguing against the state of society we are considering from the consequences to which it would give rise, but against the possibility of its ever existing. It is to object to a system on account of the consequences which would follow if we were to suppose men to be actuated by entirely different motives and principles from what they are at present, and then to say, that those consequences would necessarily follow, because men would never be what we suppose them. Or it is to alarm the imagination by deprecating the evils that must follow from the practical adoption of a particular scheme, yet to allow that we have no reason to dread those consequences, but because the scheme itself is impracticable →→ I am ashamed of wasting your readers' time › and my own in thus beating the air. It is not, however, my fault, that Mr. Malthus |