Page:Hazlitt, Political Essays (1819).djvu/481

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439

16. Whether these two things are not fundamentally distinct in themselves, and ought not to be kept so, in a question of such importance, as the right of the rich to starve the poor by system?

17. Whether Mr. Malthus has not been too much disposed to consider the rich as a sort of Gods upon earth, who were merely employed in distributing the goods of nature and fortune among the poor, who themselves neither ate nor drank, "neither married nor were given in marriage," and consequently were altogether unconcerned in the limited extent of the means of subsistence, and the unlimited increase of population?

18. Lastly, whether the whole of the reverend author's management of the principle of population and of the necessity of moral restraint, does not seem to have been copied from the prudent Friar's advice in Chaucer?

"Beware therefore with lordes for to play,
Singeth Placebo:—
To a poor man men should his vices tell,
But not to a lord, though he should go to hell."


THE END.



J. M'Creery, Printer, Black-Horse-Court, London.