pensation, which alone renders
society tolerable under such circumstances. But the benefit accruing is no
adequate set-off, if society be viewed as a whole, to the evil incurred.
If two millions of Irish labourers are working at sixpence a-day each, and
two millions more of human beings, in the Emerald Isle, are in a state of
destitution, it is a poor compensation for such a dreadful state of things
to observe, that some hundred Irish noblemen, or absentee proprietors, are
spending ten or twenty thousand a-year each amidst the luxuries of London,
Paris, or Naples; and that they sometimes extract five or six guineas an
acre from their starving tenants. If weavers in Renfrewshire, and cotton
operatives in Lancashire, are making cotton cloths at eightpence a-day of
wages, we are not to be deluded into the belief that society is
prosperous, because every year six or eight cotton lords buy estates for a
hundred thousand pounds a-piece; and one-half of the railways in the
kingdom are constructed with the wealth of Manchester and Glasgow. There
are no two things more different than national riches and the wealth of
the rich in a nation.

It is the fatal and ruinous effect of wealth, thus accumulated in the
hands of a few, at the expense of the great bulk of the industrious
classes in a state, that it tends to perpetuate and increase the diseased
and perilous state of society from which it sprang. The common
observations, that money makes money, and that poverty breeds poverty,
show how universally the experience of mankind has felt that capital, in
the long run, gives an overwhelming advantage in the race for riches to
the rich, and that poverty as uniformly, erelong, gives the vast
superiority in numbers to the poor. We often hear of an earl or a
merchant-prince mourning the want of an heir, but scarcely ever of a
Highland couple or an Irish hovel wanting their overflowing brood of
little half-naked savages. We occasionally hear of a poor man raising
himself by talent and industry to fortune; but in general he does so only
by associating his skill with some existing capital, and giving its owner
thus the extraordinary advantage of uniting old wealth with a new
discovery. To get on in the world without capital is daily becoming more
difficult to the great bulk of men: it is, in trade or commerce, at least,
wholly impossible. Thus, as wealth accumulates in the capital and great
cities of the empire, destitution, poverty, and, of