The new Poor Law of 1834 differed from Malthus in that it did not deny the right to relieve, and still kept up the fiction that the law of Elizabeth was good, and we had degenerated from it.[722] But it allowed the right only to the indigent,[723] refusing all relief in aid of wages to the merely poor and the able-bodied; and it carried out the principle that dependent poverty (in the words of Malthus) should be held disgraceful and made disagreeable. “Every penny bestowed that tends to render the condition of a pauper more eligible than that of the independent labourer is a bounty on indolence and vice.” “In proportion as the condition of any pauper class is elevated above the condition of independent labourers, the condition of the independent class is depressed.”[724] If this meant that poor relief should run a race with the average wages of labour, keeping always one stage behind them, it might be argued that in good times a pauper would get too much comfort and in bad times too little food. But the disgrace of dependence and the discomfort of constraint are the deterrents which Malthus himself has most in mind. Without the discussions raised by the _Essay on Population_ it is very doubtful if public opinion would have been so far advanced in 1834 as to make a bill, drawn on such lines, at all likely to pass into law. The abolition of outdoor relief to the able-bodied was nothing short of a revolution. It had needed a lifetime of economical doctrine, reproof, and correction to convince our public men, and to some extent the nation, that the way of rigour was at once the way of justice, of mercy, and of self-interest. The history of the English Poor Law is ample proof that men do not instinctively follow their own interest. It was the ratepayer’s interest,[725] unless he was an employer, that relief should be sparely given; and it was given lavishly. It was the poor man’s interest to be thrifty and sober; and as a rule he was neither. There was no hope of reform till both rich and poor learned a deeper sense of their personal responsibility for the remoter effects of their own acts, whether unwisely benevolent or heedlessly selfish. The clear consciousness of personal responsibility seems to Malthus to be the soul and centre of every healthy reform. In this sense, at least, he would say that virtue is knowledge. His thoughts on society are connected at this point with his thoughts on man’s place and duty in the world. His psychology and ethics, slightly as they are sketched, throw light on his sociology and economics, and must be considered before we can estimate his position in social philosophy. This will lead us over the greater portion of the fourth book of the essay, leaving the critical chapters till we come to deal with the Critics as a body. BOOK III. MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.