stinence, with its so frequent attendant-self-abuse, is by far the most important of all; that perhaps next comes premature death, before the reproductive age is over; next, prostitution; next abortion; and perhaps lastly, sterility, as far as it is not dependent on prostitution. These checks to the fertility of woman, together with the corresponding checks to that of man, and death at more advanced periods of life, form the sum of the positive and preventive checks to population.

The fallacious theory of a change in the human constitution is an admirable instance of that short-sighted Optimism, in which so many thinkers have indulged in the world's history. By optimism is meant the belief, that there is some self-adjusting power in Nature, or some merciful guiding Providence, by which human ills all work for good, and are ultimately to be overcome. In this case we are to console ourselves with the encouraging prospect, that the human constitution will gradually undergo a change in our favour; to wait helplessly till the stream of misery has flowed past us, and then we shall enter the promised land of indefinite perfectibility. But we may sooner expect that the river will return to its source, or the seas cover the mountain tops, than that the fundamental character of the human frame will alter; for it is much less changeable than they. These and similar delusive hopes, springing from the want of perception of the mighty difficulty opposed by nature, are extremely dangerous, and have led to an immensity of evil. By the discovery of the law of population, Mr. Malthus gave the death-blow to all such views, and to every theory of human progress, which had been erected in ignorance of it. He showed to demonstration the real cause which opposed the satisfactory advance of mankind; and also that the indispensable condition of such advance was a great increase in the preventive check to population. He first, like M. Lallemand in spermatorrhoea, traced the surface evils of society, which had till his time been mistaken for the radical ones, to their hidden source; he was the true physician, who alone saw the real meaning of the appalling disease, under which the human race has been labouring ever since it appeared on this earth; the only true friend the Door ever had, the friend who had not only the heart, but the head, to help them: ana wuose profound revelation, gloomy and apparently almost hopeless as it snowed their lot to be, was yet infinitely more valuable to the poor, than the most splendid dreams of visionary perfectibility ever conceived.

Socialism is one of these short-sighted schemes, and is built upon the same false foundation as the rest; namely, that it is possible that man should make satisfactory progress, without a great increase in the preventive check to population. Socialism, like other schemes, leaves this matter out of the question, and confines its attention to various methods of increasing the produce of human industry, and equalising its distribution; which, whatever be their merits, are, without the other, not worth a moment's scrutiny. Put all the various human advantages, to the acquisition of which Socialism and all the usual efforts of society are directed, on one side, and diminished reproduction on the other; and we may be certain that every struggle for the former will be utterly vain and futile, so far as the great part of society is concerned, without the latter. The one carnot be got without the other.

The peculiar error of Socialism is, that it attributes to the constitution of society and to competition, (as political reformers do to forms of government, and theologians to man's original sin,) the evils, which really spring from the principle of population. It falls into the inveterate and almost universal error of ascribing the chief ills of mankind to human institutions, instead of to Nature. It vehemently urges the adoption of a complete change in our social fabric, but to what end? After all this trouble, there would not be one of the great human difficulties removed. If the preventive check to population be increased, Socialism is not needed; if not, it is useless.

I shall now proceed to the fuller examination of these momentous sexual and social questions. This forms the subject of the following Essay, which is the key-stone of this work.

POVERTY, ITS ONLY CAUSE AND

ITS ONLY CURE;

WITH

THE SOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM.

POVERTY is the most appalling of all the evils which oppress mankind. Other great evils, such as war, or pestilence, are, when compared with poverty, but of little importance. They are evanescent, occurring only at rare intervals; and are but as the few drops, which make the deep cup of human misery now and then overflow. They are, moreover, in general, nothing but effects of the poverty, in which, with its inseparable social misery, discontent, and angry passions, the majority of mankind are plunged; and which is the main root of the most important transitory evils that we are subject to at the present day. If there were no poverty to give rise to squalid and unhealthy districts in our towns, pestilence, (which has been shown by statistics to be very greatly more destructive to life than war), would rarely appear among us, and would have little power to affect human happiness. If social discontent, and the angry and envious feelings that poverty engenders, were allayed by its removal, the standing armies (which are in the usual circumstances of modern States needed much more to keep in check the poorer classes, than to guard against foreign hostilities,) could be reduced; and international wars, together with civil wars, would become in all probability a thing of the past.

And yet mankind are by no means sufficiently alive to the enormous and incomparable magnitude of the evils of poverty. If a war or a pestilence threatens us, every one is excited at the prospect of the misery which may result; prayers are put up, and every solemn and mournful feeling called forth; but these evils are to poverty, but as a grain of sand in the desert, as the light waves that ruffle a dark sea of despair. Wars come, and go, and perhaps their greatest evils consist in their aggravation of poverty by the high prices they cause; pestilences last their appointed season, and then leave us; but poverty, the grim tyrant of our race, abides with us through all ages and in all circumstances. For one victim that war and pestilence have slain, for one heart that they have racked with suffering, poverty has slain its millions; and not slain alone, but first condemned them to drag through a life of bondage and degradation.

"The poor ye have always with you," was said two thousand years ago, and would have been as appalling a truth at any time before or since. Let us mount to the remotest antiquity; let us regard the countless myriads of China and Hindostan, of our own, or any other country of the old world at the present day; and we shall find poverty, and her sister Hard Work--the want of Food, and of Leisure, everywhere plunging the great mass of our race in an abyss of misery and degradation. It is this universal prevalence and constant continuance of poverty, which have in a great measure accustomed men to its evils, and prevented them from either sufficiently feeling, or conceiving any hope of ever escaping from them. The ignorance of the great cause of poverty moreover, which is even yet so prevalent, notwithstanding the writings of Mr. Malthus and others, has made many people view it rather as a disgrace, and as brought on by individual laziness, drunkenness, or misconduct; a belief which interfered with their pity for it, and rendered totally abortive any effort they might make to alleviate it. Unacquainted with its cause, men think it an absolutely inevitable evil: and thus try to reconcile themselves to it, and to avoid a subject, whose consideration would almost lead them to despair of human society. Yes;

"It is easy to bear the ills of others with christian fortitude." although we, who look on, may reconcile ourselves to this horrible condition of the majority of our fellows; although we may seek to disguise it, by vain boasts of the advance of civilization, the progress of society, and the splendour of individual virtue, talent, and the other bright spots in human life, which dazzle the superficial gaze, and prevent it from seeing the dark shades of vice and suffering which hang around; alas! the poor themselves can never be reconciled to poverty, their human flesh and blood cannot stand its insufferable miseries, and to them all big talk of the progress of mankind is a delusion and a lie.

The life of our working classes is worse than that of most of the beasts of burden. They toil unremittingly for ten or twelve hours a-day at a laborious, monotonous, and in many cases a deadly occupation; without hope of advancement, or personai interest in the success of the work they are engaged in. At night their jaded frames are too tired to permit their enjoyment of the few leisure hours; and the morn wakens them to the same dreary day of ceaseless toil. Even the seventh day, their only holiday, brings them in this country little gaiety, little recreation; a solemn sermon, and two hours of sedentary constraint is all that is provided for them. The clergy and others, who are indignant that a poor working man does not go to church on his only holiday, should themselves try his life for six months, and see then what appetite they will have for church; when their limbs are wasting with incessant toil, their nerves beginning to give way, and their hearts embittered by a life of constant drudgery and care.

Thus have the poor to toil on, as long as their strength permits. At last some organ gives way, the stomach, the eyes, or the brain; and the unfortunate sufferer is thrown out of work, and sent to the hospital, while his wife and family are reduced to the brink of starvation. Often the man, rendered desperate by his hopeless position, plunges into drink

and gives himself over to ruin. At other times, the working classes in a frenzy of rage at their infernal circumstances, determine that they will have higher wages or perish. Hence result the disastrous strikes, and the terrible social revolutions, that have in recent times so often convulsed society. But they are vain; they are but the blind effort of men to do something or die, the fruitless heavings of a man in a nightmare. The mountain of misery invariably falls back again upon their breasts, with only increased pressure; and forces them, worn out by impotent struggles, to bear it quietly for another little season.

Till within the last half century, it may be said that the evils of poverty were very little either understood or sympathised in by the richer and better educated part of mankind. The richer classes took little more interest in, and had little more communion with the poorest class, than if they had been an inferior order of beings. Was it not the lot of the poor to slave and toil for the pleasures of the rich, and were they not paid for so doing? The unhappy class-feelings also, which totally prevented and till prevent, the richer among us from mingling freely with the poorer, and treating them with that equal mutual respect and politeness, which should exist between all men, fostered the ignorance on the subject of poverty. But of late years this subject has become one of the most engrossing and wide-spread interest; and there are few among us now-a-days, who are not tolerably well aware of the inconceivable wretchedness of the poorest classes among us, and of the fearful evils of hard work, unhealthy occupations, and low wages, under which this country groans. Writers on political economy, and on medical and moral subjects, have almost all come to the conclusion, that the evils of poverty, and the wretched destitution and ignorance of our poorer classes, are the most pressing subject for the consideration of all men. Several admirable works of fiction, pre-eminent among which stands Alton Locke, have made the life and struggles of the poor the theme by which they awakened the deepest sympathy in the minds of all; and now there are few novels or poems of much merit, in which the sufferings of poverty do not throw a shade over the brighter scenes, and cloud the heart of the writer and the reader. We do not care now for toe artificial glitter of court etiquette, nor the hollow ceremonies of fashionable life; we have comparatively little sympathy with the caprices of high-born lords and ladies, who have engrossed so unfair a share of man's attention: we wish to know the inner life of man, and most of all the thoughts and sufferings of those, who have been the most neglected by their fellow creatures.

There is perhaps no work of the day, which gives so mournfully interesting an insightinto the lives of the poorest classes, as Mr. Mayhew's inimittable "London Labour, and London Poor ;" and the truths which he lays bare to us in that work, are such as to freeze our blood with horror and anguish. It is the account of the manner, in which hundreds of thou sands of our fellow beings are gradually ground and pressed to death and multiform destruction by hard work, and want of food. It tells us of starvation, disease, prostitution, crime, and every conceivable moral and physical degradation, to waich these unhappy ones who are born at the foot of our social scale, are inexorably doomed. No hope, no chance of rising