_Mr. Fax._ Let us suppose that ten thousand quarters of wheat will maintain ten thousand persons during any given portion of time: if the ten thousand quarters be reduced to five, or if the ten thousand persons be increased to twenty, the consequence will be immediate and general distress: yet if the proportions be equally distributed, as in a ship on short allowance, the general perception of necessity and justice will preserve general patience and mutual goodwill; but let the first supposition remain unaltered, let there be ten thousand quarters of wheat, which shall be full allowance for ten thousand people; then, if four thousand persons take to themselves the portion of eight thousand, and leave to the remaining six thousand the portion of two (and this I fear is even an inadequate picture of the common practice of the world), these latter will be in a much worse condition on the last than on the first supposition; while the habit of selfish prodigality deadening all good feelings and extinguishing all sympathy on the one hand, and the habit of debasement and suffering combining with the inevitable sense of oppression and injustice on the other, will produce an action and reaction of open, unblushing, cold-hearted pride, and servile, inefficient, ill-disguised resentment, which no philanthropist can contemplate without dismay. _Mr. Forester._ What then will be the case if the same disproportionate division continues by regular gradations through the remaining six thousand, till the lowest thousand receive such a fractional pittance as will scarcely keep life together? If any of these perish with hunger, what are they but the victims of the first four thousand, who appropriated more to themselves than either nature required or justice allowed? This, whatever the temporisers with the world may say of it, I have no hesitation in pronouncing to be wickedness of the most atrocious kind; and this I make no doubt was the sense of the founder of the Christian religion when he said, _It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven_. _Mr. Fax._ You must beware of the chimaera of an agrarian law, the revolutionary doctrine of an equality of possession; which can never be possible in practice, till the whole constitution of human nature be changed.