thousand acres of barley! He occupies what was formerly 40 farms! Is it any wonder that _paupers increase_? And is there not here cause enough for the increase of _poor_, without resorting to the doctrine of the barbarous and impious MALTHUS and his assistants, the _feelosofers_ of the Edinburgh Review, those eulogists and understrappers of the Whig-Oligarchy? "This farmer has done nothing _unlawful_," some one will say. I say he has; for there is a law to forbid him thus to monopolize land. But no matter; the laws, the management of the affairs of a nation, _ought to be such as to prevent the existence of the temptation to such monopoly_. And, even now, the evil ought to be remedied, and could be remedied, in the space of half a dozen years. The disappearance of the paper-money would do the thing in time; but this might be assisted by legislative measures.--In returning from the forest we were overtaken by my son, whom I had begged to come from London to see this beautiful country. On the road-side we saw two lazy-looking fellows, in long great-coats and bundles in their hands, going into a cottage. "What do you deal in?" said I, to one of them, who had not yet entered the house. "In the _medical way_," said he. And I find that vagabonds of this description are seen all over the country with _tea-licences_ in their pockets. They vend _tea_, _drugs_, and _religious tracts_. The first to bring the body into a debilitated state; the second to finish the corporeal part of the business; and the third to prepare the spirit for its separation from the clay! Never was a system so well calculated as the present to degrade, debase, and enslave a people! Law, and as if that were not sufficient, enormous subscriptions are made; everything that can be done is done to favour these perambulatory impostors in their depredations on the ignorant, while everything that can be done is done to prevent them from reading, or from hearing of, anything that has a tendency to give them rational notions, or to better their lot. However, all is not buried in ignorance. Down the deep and beautiful valley between Penyard Hill and the Hills on the side of the Forest of Dean, there runs a stream of water. On that stream of water there is a _paper-mill_. In that paper-mill there is a set of workmen. That set of workmen do, I am told, _take the Register_, and have taken it for years! It was to these good and sensible men, it is supposed, that the _ringing of the bells_ of Weston church, upon my arrival, was to be ascribed; for nobody that I visited had any knowledge of the cause. What a subject for lamentation with corrupt hypocrites! That even on this secluded spot there should be a leaven of common-sense! No: _all_ is not enveloped in brute ignorance yet, in spite of every artifice that hellish Corruption has been able to employ; in spite of all her menaces and all her brutalities and cruelties. _Old Hall, Thursday, 15 Nov._