arge estate, says upon this subject, 'Every family, even of
the poorest labourer, consisting of five persons, may be considered as
paying, in indirect taxes, at least ten pounds a year, or more than
half his wages at seven shillings a week!' And yet the insolent
hirelings call you the mob, the rabble, the scum, the swinish
multitude, and say that your voice is nothing; that you have no
business at public meetings; and that you are, and ought to be
considered as nothing in the body politic! Shall we never see the day
when these men will change their tone! Will they never cease to look
upon us [as on] brutes! I trust they will change their tone, and that
the day of the change is at no great distance!

The weight of the Poor-rate, which must increase while the present
system continues, alarms the corrupt, who plainly see that what is
paid to relieve you, they cannot have. Some of them, therefore, hint
at your early marriages as a great evil, and a clergyman named Malthus
has seriously proposed measures for checking you in this respect;
while one of the correspondents of the Board of Agriculture complains
of the increase of bastards, and proposes severe punishment on the
parents! How hard these men are to please! What would they have you
do? As some have called you the swinish multitude, would it be much
wonder if they were to propose to serve you as families of young pigs
are served? Or if they were to bring forward the measure of Pharaoh,
who ordered the midwives to kill all the male children of the
Israelites?

But, if you can restrain your indignation at these insolent notions
and schemes, with what feelings must you look upon the condition of
your country, where the increase of the people is now looked upon as a
curse! Thus, however, has it always been, in all countries where taxes
have produced excessive misery. Our countryman, Mr. Gibbon, in his
History of the _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, has the
following passage: 'The horrid practice of murdering their new-born
infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces. It was
the effect of _distress_, and the distress was principally occasioned
by the _intolerable burden of taxes_, and by the vexatious as well as
cruel prosecutions of the officers of the revenue against their
insolvent debtors. The less opulent or less industrious part of
mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an
act of paternal tenderness to release the ch