man is
exposed, and the sense of injustice due to an ignorance of the true
cause of misery, tend to 'sour the disposition, to harden the heart,
and deaden the moral sense.' Unfortunately, the means which have been
adopted to lessen the evil have tended to increase it. In the first
place, there was the master-evil of the poor-laws. Malthus points out
the demoralising effects of these laws in chapters full of admirable
common sense, which he was unfortunately able to enforce by fresh
illustrations in successive editions. He attends simply to the
stimulus to population. He thinks that if the laws had never existed,
the poor would now have been much better off.[251] If the laws had
been fully carried out, every labourer might have been certain that
all his children would be supported, or, in other words, every check
to population would have been removed.[252] Happily, the becoming
pride of the English peasantry was not quite extinct; and the poor-law
had to some extent counteracted itself, or taken away with one hand
what it gave with the other, by placing the burthen upon the
parishes.[253] Thus landlords have been more disposed to pull down
than to build cottages, and marriage has been checked. On the whole,
however, Malthus could see in the poor-laws nothing but a vast agency
for demoralising the poor, tempered by a system of petty tyrannical
interference. He proposes, therefore, that the poor-law should be
abolished. Notice should be given that no children born after a
certain day should be entitled to parish help; and, as he quaintly
suggests, the clergyman might explain to every couple, after
publishing the banns, the immorality of reckless marriage, and the
reasons for abolishing a system which had been proved to frustrate the
intentions of the founders.[254] Private charity, he thinks, would
meet the distress which might afterwards arise, though humanity
imperiously requires that it should be 'sparingly administered.' Upon
this duty he writes a sensible chapter.[255] To his negative proposals
Malthus adds a few of the positive kind. He is strongly in favour of a
national system of education, and speaks with contempt of the
'illiberal and feeble' arguments opposed to it. The schools, he
observes, might confer 'an almost incalculable benefit' upon society,
if they taught 'a few of the simplest principles of political
economy.'[256] He had been disheartened by the prejudices of the
ignorant labourer, and felt the inco