made up from his own conversation.] But so you would do, if you tried the case of _animal_ increase by still exterminating all but one replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a pretence of trying, one order of powers against another. That was folly. But Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that nobody understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in coming to the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws, Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a _res integra_, to Dr. Alison, the capital argument that legal and _adequate_ provision for the poor, whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out of work, does not extend pauperism--no, but is the one great resource for putting it down. Dr. Alison's overwhelming and _experimental_ manifestations of that truth have prostrated Malthus and his generation for ever. This comes of not attending to the Latin maxim--'_Hoc_ age'--mind the object before you. Dr. Alison, a wise man, '_hoc_ egit:' Coleridge '_aliud_ egit.' And we see the result. In a case which suited him, by interesting his peculiar feeling, Coleridge could command 'Attention full ten times as much as there needs.' But search documents, value evidence, or thresh out bushels of statistical tables, Coleridge could not, any more than he could ride with Elliot's dragoons. Another instance of Coleridge's inaptitude for such studies as political economy is found in his fancy, by no means 'rich and rare,' but meagre and trite, that taxes can never injure public prosperity by mere excess of quantity; if they injure, we are to conclude that it must be by their quality and mode of operation, or by their false appropriation, (as, for instance, if they are sent out of the country and spent abroad.) Because, says Coleridge, if the taxes are exhaled from the country as vapors, back they come in drenching showers. Twenty pounds ascend in a Scotch mist to the Chancellor of the Exchequer from Leeds; but does it evaporate? Not at all: By return of post down comes an order for twenty pounds' worth of Leeds cloth, on account of Government, seeing that the poor men of the ----th regiment want new gaiters. True; but of this return twenty pounds, not more than four will be profit, _i.e._, surplus accruing to the public capital; whereas, of the original twenty pounds, every shilling was surplus. The same unsound fancy has been many times brought forward; often in England, often in France. But it is curious, that its first appearance upon any stage was precisely two centuries ago, when as yet political economy slept with the pre-Adamites, viz., in the Long Parliament. In a quarto volume of the debates during 1644-45, printed as an independent work, will be found the same identical doctrine, supported very sonorously by the same little love of an illustration from the see-saw of mist and rain.