neration at
least, destined to be different from what they had proved to our First
Parents. While wealth was increasing to an unparalleled extent among the
commercial classes, suffering and distress as generally ensued among the
rural inhabitants; and the multitude of ruined fortunes among them
rendered it certain, that at no distant period the old race of landed
proprietors would, with the exception of a few magnates, be all rooted
out, and their place supplied by a new set of purchasers from the
commercial towns. While population was advancing with unparalleled strides
in the manufacturing districts, pauperism even more than kept pace with it
in all; and the extraordinary fact has now been revealed by statistical
researches, that, in an age of unparalleled wealth and general and
long-continued peace, a _seventh_ part of the whole inhabitants of the
British islands are in a state of destitution, or painfully supported by
legal relief.[2]

While all attempts, even, to pay off the national debt have been abandoned
by Government, and the principle openly proclaimed by the Prime Minister,
that any surplus of revenue above expenditure must, to relieve the
necessities of the country, be applied to the reduction of taxation,
without a thought to the reduction of the debt; the Home Secretary has
announced the not less alarming fact, that, since the peace, above two
hundred millions sterling, or a fourth of the national debt, has been
raised for the relief of the poor in England alone. While the returns of
the income-tax have demonstrated that seventy thousand persons in Great
Britain possess among them an annual revenue of two hundred millions
a-year, or about L.2300 each on an average, the melancholy fact has been
revealed, by the result of attempts to increase the national revenue by
means of indirect taxation, that that source of income can no longer be
relied on; and in a time of profound, and at the close of a period of
long-continued peace, it has become indispensable to recur to an
assessment on property and direct taxation, as it was in Rome in the
decaying periods of the empire. The blue folios of the Houses of
Parliament teem with authentic and decisive evidence of the vast increase,
during the last thirty years, of crime and frequent destitution among the
working classes in all parts of the empire; every four or five years, a
brief feverish period of gambling, extravagance, and commercial
prosperity, is succeeded by