Yet he admits that the badness of the law has been largely counteracted by the remissness of its execution. The attempt to secure a fixed rate of wages to the labourer in all states of trade has not really been made in England as the Elizabethan Poor Law enjoined. The scantiness of the relief actually given, together with the insolence of the officials concerned in the giving of it, has disturbed the sense of complete security, which in the view of Malthus would in such a case have been fatal. “The desire of bettering our condition and the fear of making it worse, like the _vis mediatrix naturæ_ in physics, is the _vis mediatrix reipublicæ_ in politics, and is continually counteracting the disorders arising from narrow human institutions.” The Poor Law has been so imperfectly carried out that it has left some room still for prudential motives among the labourers; they cannot count on complete provision for their families if they marry recklessly, and some few of them still think caution needful. Moreover, from fear of the Poor Law the rich will often refuse to build cottages, lest their occupants become paupers.[714] In the third place, pauper children, like foundlings, do not live long.[715] In his _Letter to Samuel Whitbread, M.P., on his proposed Bill for the amendment of the Poor Laws_ (1807), Malthus allows that abolition must not come till public opinion is ripe for it; but he recommends legislation in the direction of abolition, to prepare the minds of all classes for the final steps, and to expose to the working classes the delusiveness of the present boon. Poor Laws, he says, are peculiar to England, and their absence in other countries does not seem to have the effects expected from their abolition here. In reply to Malthus, it might be urged that the Poor Laws are not entirely peculiar to England, but occur in Denmark and elsewhere.[716] In the second place, as MacCulloch argues in a letter, aimed at Malthus, to Macvey Napier,[717] Britain is peculiarly subject to fluctuations in trade, due, for example, to the changes in foreign tariffs, and therefore there are more cases of sudden and unavoidable distress, that need such a provision as the Poor Law’s. In the third place, too, it is difficult to see how we can make begging unlawful if we make legal relief inaccessible,[718] any more than we can logically make education compulsory while we insist on the payment of fees. In the fourth place, an indiscriminate private charity is probably more mischievous than a discriminating public relief. Malthus, however, was not against all relief, but only against it when claimed as a right; and he was fully aware that the risks of the English working man were greater than those of his Continental brethren. All he desired was to give the workman scope for that sense of personal responsibility out of which the Poor Law was beguiling him. He knew quite well that no good end would be served by the removal of the Poor