But the new application took hold on the public fancy. Sir William Pulteney and Windham are said to have been, beyond others, delighted with its conservative moral.[695] Malthus may have got the hint of it from a passage in Paley’s _Moral and Political Philosophy_. Paley was criticizing a justification of private property, which founded it on every man’s right to take what he wants of the things God made for the use of all, just as, when an entertainment is given to the freeholders (as the free and independent electors?) of a county, we see them coming in and eating and drinking each what he chooses, without asking the consent of the other guests. The simile, says Paley, is not perfect, for in a freeholder’s feast nobody is allowed to fill his pockets or to throw anything away, “especially if by so doing he pinched the guests at the lower end of the table.”[696] Even the friends of Malthus thought the passage too gloomy; and, as every one noticed,[697] it was not retained after 1803. It contains, however, at least two positions that were never retracted:—that the poor cannot claim relief as a right, but only as a favour, and that poor relief can only raise one man by depressing another. The latter position may be illustrated from the tract written in 1800 on the _High Price of Provisions_. The main aim of the tract was to show that the price was too extravagantly high to be due to the deficiency, which was admittedly only one-fourth. But the author throws light on his own general doctrines.[698] He argues, in substance, that to give relief in money is to enable the relieved persons to retain their ordinary rate of consumption at the expense of the rest. To this the reply is obvious:—the sufficiency of the stock is not so finely calculated, neither is the amount of it so fixed that it cannot be increased from home or foreign stores,—and to withdraw money from the rich for the poor, and increase the country’s total expenditure on necessaries, might be simply to divert the stream of importation into the channel of necessaries, and lead to a larger use of food other than bread. Under the conditions of the time, however, the author’s views were not unnatural. On his return from Sweden in 1800 he found scarcity prevailing in England as elsewhere, but with prices much higher than in other countries. These were the days when Chief Justice Kenyon and a jury enforced the antiquated laws against forestalling and regrating.[699] Malthus had not read his Adam Smith to so little purpose that he could approve such proceedings; much of his pamphlet was simply an application, to one particular case, of the principles of the _Wealth of Nations_ (Book IV. chap. v.).[700] Neither could he agree with the notion that the paper currency had done it all.[701] Settling down to his parish work in Surrey, he watched the course of events. What happened, he said, there and presumably elsewhere was as follows:—In