“Because they were so circumstanced as to perceive at once the fallacy of the supposed remedies which you and other benevolent persons here are advocating. The great body of the people among the Greeks were slaves, maintained by masters, and not, as with us, free labourers supported by their own toil. The deficiency of food was there first felt by the masters, in the cost of supporting their slaves. Here, it is felt mainly by the labourers in the fall of the real value of wages. In Greece, there was no dispute about the fact, from the moment that food became deficient. Here, such a deficiency is even now questioned by multitudes who declare that we have not a redundant, but only a poor population; that nobody wants food who has enough to give for it; and that therefore it is money, or work that is wanted, and not food. Such observers give alms, or pay their poor neighbours for digging holes and filling them up again, or doing things equally useless; never dreaming that all the while they are taking food from somebody who has earned it by a better kind of toil. Such follies as this could never be suggested by the state of things in Greece; and I see no reason why, because our lower orders are not slaves, we should not abjure our errors, and adopt such parts of the Grecian policy as were wise.” “Well, but, the long and short of the matter is this. If the quantity of food in Great Britain is too small, cannot it be increased?” “To be sure it can. If ten thousand individuals can live this year only by taking a portion from their neighbours, we may raise as much food in addition next year as may feed ten thousand people; but if the people at the same time increase still faster, how are we better off than we were before?” “But cannot we raise enough that year for twenty thousand people instead of ten thousand, to meet the difficulty? The People’s Farm would admit of this.” “It would: but here the question recurs, whether it will not answer better to send the ten or twenty thousand people where they may obtain food at much less cost of toil and capital, and where their descendants will not be liable to tax the mother country for food for generations yet unborn. At home it is only by a considerable sacrifice that the growth of food can be made for any length of time to equal,—or by any extraordinary effort to outstrip the demands upon it; while, abroad, it spontaneously keeps ahead of population, and will do so in many parts, till men have grown wise enough to regulate population. Our best present policy, then, is to send our surplus numbers abroad to eat and prosper, instead of obliging more and more of our multitudes to dig at home. It is on your wish to make them do so much labour for a lesser instead of a greater production, that I founded my charge of your ultimately making a part of society pay too dear for their food.” “You mean because labour is the price of food?”