de food for himself and his family. 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. If these flattering prospects be ever realised, it must be
owing to some wise and salutary regulations counteracting that
inequality among mankind which proceeds from the present _fixed_
disproportion of their possessions.

I am not an advocate for the agrarian law nor for sumptuary regulations,
but I contend that the people amongst whom the law of primogeniture
exists, and among whom corporate bodies are encouraged, and immense
salaries annexed to useless and indeed hereditary offices, is oppressed
by an inequality in the distribution of wealth which does not
necessarily attend men in a state of civil society.

Thus far we have considered inequalities inseparable from civil society.
But other arbitrary distinctions exist among mankind, either from
choice or usurpation. I allude to titles, to stars, ribbons, and
garters, and other badges of fictitious superiority. Your Lordship will
not question the grand principle on which this inquiry set out; I look
upon it, then, as my duty to try the propriety of these distinctions by
that criterion, and think it will be no difficult task to prove that
these separations among mankind are absurd, imp