Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
This Dead Weight is, unquestionably, a thing, such as the world never
saw before. Here are not only a tribe of pensioned naval and military
officers, commissaries, quartermasters, pursers, and God knows what
besides; not only these, but their wives and children are to be
pensioned, after the death of the heroes themselves. Nor does it
signify, it seems, whether the hero were married before he became part
of the Dead Weight or since. Upon the death of the man, the pension is
to begin with the wife, and a pension for each child; so that, if there
be a large family of children, the family, in many cases, actually gains
by the death of the father! Was such a thing as this ever before heard
of in the world? Any man that is going to die has nothing to do but to
marry a girl to give her a pension for life to be paid out of the sweat
of the people; and it was distinctly stated, during the Session of
Parliament before the last, that the widows and children of insane
officers were to have the same treatment as the rest! Here is the envy
of surrounding nations and the admiration of the world! In addition,
then, to twenty thousand parsons, more than twenty thousand
stock-brokers and stock-jobbers perhaps; forty or fifty thousand
tax-gatherers; thousands upon thousands of military and naval officers
in full pay; in addition to all these, here are the thousands upon
thousands of pairs of this Dead Weight, all busily engaged in breeding
gentlemen and ladies; and all while Malthus is wanting to put a check
upon the breeding of the labouring classes; all receiving a _premium for
breeding_! Where is Malthus? Where is this check-population parson?
Where are his friends, the Edinburgh Reviewers? Faith, I believe they
have given him up. They begin to be ashamed of giving countenance to a
man who wants to check the breeding of those who labour, while he says
not a word about those two hundred thousand breeding pairs, whose
offspring are necessarily to be maintained at the public charge. Well
may these fatteners upon the labour of others rail against the Radicals!
Let them once take the fan to their hand, and they will, I warrant it,
thoroughly purge the floor. However, it is a consolation to know, that
the jolterheads who have been the promoters of the measures that have
led to these heavy charges; it is a consolation to know that the
jolterheads have now to bear part of the charges, and that they cannot
any longer make them fall exclusively upon the shoulders of the
labouring classes. The disgust that one feels at seeing the whiskers,
and hearing the copper heels rattle, is in some measure compensated for
by the reflection, that the expense of them is now beginning to fall
upon the malignant and tyrannical jolterheads who are the principal
cause of their being created.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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