I appeal to innumerable statutes, whose constant and professed object it is to lower the price of labour, to compel the workman to be _content_ with arbitrary wages, evidently too small from the necessity of legal enforcement of the acceptance of them.

Even from the astonishing amount of the sums raised for the support of one description of the poor may be concluded the extent and greatness of that oppression, whose effects have rendered it possible for the few to afford so much, and have shown us that such a multitude of our brothers exist in even helpless indigence.

Your Lordship tells us that the science of civil government has received all the perfection of which it is capable.

For my part, I am more enthusiastic.

The sorrow I feel from the contemplation of this melancholy picture is not unconsoled by a comfortable hope that the class of wretches called mendicants will not much longer shock the feelings of humanity; that the miseries entailed upon the marriage of those who are not rich will no longer tempt the bulk of mankind to fly to that promiscuous intercourse to which they are impelled by the instincts of nature, and the dreadful satisfaction of escaping the prospect of infants, sad fruit of such intercourse, whom they are unable to support.