Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/65

estate. What is this but interdicting marriage by taking the most stringent precautions against it? We know a certain noble lady, now living, who, not many years ago, when appointing a master and mistress to instruct the young people in a boys' and girls' school (established upon one of her estates), made it a positive condition of their appointment that, although they were man and wife, they should have no children while they held their situation! This titled Malthusian is by no means a rare specimen of her rank or sex; on the contrary, she is but a sample of the sack; and the sack is judged by the sample. In truth, from Lord John Russell and his Grace of Richmond down to "penny-a-line Chadwick," of poor-law notoriety, and the very lowest of his understrappers, there prevails but one sentiment on this subject, namely, an unmitigated dread and hatred of affording any encouragement to the labouring classes to marry. And, from the manner in which they have contrived to frame and administer our present system of poor-laws (throwing the weight of the burden where there is least strength to bear it), we may add, with truth, that they have succeeded in making the great body of our ratepayers as anti-matrimonial and as thoroughly Malthusian as themselves.

As the tree is known by its fruit, so may we judge of the relative merits of the system which facilitates and encourages marriages amongst chattel-slaves, and of that which prescribes Malthusianism to our free and independent proletarians. The result of the latter system in this metropolis alone is 100,000 women obliged to subsist themselves, wholly or in part, by prostitution! The result of the former system is prostitution reduced within very narrow limits amongst the slave-class, and what there is of it is directly chargeable to the masters' own account, and not to that of their male slaves.

But enough has been said to establish our position that chattel-slavery, with all its abominations, is less destructive of life, liberty, and happiness than the wages-slavery of modern proletarianism. Were other facts and arguments necessary, we could supply them to redundancy. We therefore dismiss the subject, and shall proceed to show how Christianity unconsciously caused the greater evil in attempting to rescue humanity from the lesser.