, the aggregate mass of happiness
among the common people would have been much greater than it is at
present.

In view of all these facts I do not propose a law to prevent the poor
from marrying, but I propose a very gradual abolition of the poor laws.

By means of an extending commerce a country may be able to purchase an
increasing quantity of food, and to support an increasing population;
but extension of commerce cannot continue indefinitely; it must be
checked by competition and other economic interference; and as soon as
funds for the maintenance of labour become stationary, or begin to
decline, there will be no means of obtaining food for an increasing
population.

It is the union of the agricultural and commercial systems, and not
either of them taken separately, that is calculated to produce the
greatest national prosperity. A country with an extensive and rich
territory, the cultivation of which is stimulated by improvements in
agriculture, manufactures, and foreign commerce, has such various and
abundant resources that it is extremely difficult to say when they will
reach their limits. There are, however, limits to the capital population
of a country--limits which they must ultimately reach and cannot pass.

To secure a more abundant, and, at the same time, a steadier supply of
grain, a system of corn laws has been recommended, the object of which
is to discourage, by duties or prohibitions, the importation of foreign
corn, and to encourage by bounties the exportation of corn of home
growth.

Laws which prohibit the importation of foreign grain, though by no means
unobjectionable, are not open to the same objections as bounties, and
must be allowed to be adequate to the object they have in view, the
maintenance of an independent supply. Moreover, it is obviously
possible, by restrictions upon the importation of foreign corn, to
maintain a balance between the agricultural and commercial classes. The
question is not a question of the efficiency or inefficiency of the
measure proposed, but of its policy or impolicy. In certain cases there
can be no doubt of the impolicy of attempting to maintain an unnatural
balance between the agricultural and commercial classes; but in other
cases the impolicy is by no means so clear. Restrictions upon the
importation of foreign corn in a country which has great landed
resources tend not only to spread every commercial and manufacturing
advantage possessed, whether perma