recorded by Mr. Senior, is the value which he and
other interlocutors ascribe to the English Poor Law. Mr Senior had seen
its essential principle, the right of subsistence, worked out
farther--to extremer and more dangerous consequences--than perhaps any
other political or social experiment, before the practical common sense
of England interfered. Under the old Poor Law, at least in the rural
districts, the income of a household was regulated by its number. Every
head of a family was entitled to an allowance, increasing with its
increase, and wholly independent of his earnings. Nominal wages had been
actually forced down _below_ the starvation point. The law had
demoralized industry by placing the idlest ditcher on a level of comfort
with the best ploughman, and threatened to swallow up property in the
support of poverty. Tocqueville and his friends had seen the danger from
another point of view. The most popular and most formidable of the
dogmas of that Socialism, which had infected so deeply the _proletariat_
of Paris and other French cities, was in another and yet more insidious
and destructive form the doctrine of the Poor Law. The right of
subsistence was admitted by the establishment of the _ateliers
nationaux_, and asserted by the insurgents of June, 1848, under the
nobler and more dignified guise of the _droit au travail_. The State was
bound, according to that doctrine, not to keep the idle alive, but to
furnish the industrious with work suited to their skill at market rate
of wages; a rate which had no right to fall below the average standard
of an artizan's needs, or rather of his habits.

A principle which contradicts the laws of nature is obviously false; and
the right to subsistence--if claimed not for all who do, but for all who
may, exist in a given country--yet more clearly the _droit au travail_
of which this is the practical meaning--involves the demand, that
agricultural production shall keep pace with population. But, save for
checks all ultimately reducible to the fear of want, checks which it is
the essential object of a Poor Law to relax, population would rapidly,
in any old country, overtake subsistence. That, were the population of
England or France to multiply at an American rate, it would soon lack
standing room, is mathematically demonstrable. A poor law then must be
attended by checks on population as effective as those of Nature
herself; and from their artificial character necessarily more