This is certainly a most excellent illustration. As to the argument itself, it is all false and hollow. With respect to the rise in the price of provisions consequent on the rise of wages, I am not I confess at all concerned about it, so that the labourer is still enabled to purchase the same _necessary_ quantity as before. All that is wanted is that the one should keep pace with the other. What the natural level of the price of labour is, otherwise than as it is regulated by the positive institutions of society, or as I have before stated, by the power of one set of men, and the wants of another is—like many other things in this book of Mr. Malthus’s—what I do not understand. If we are to believe him, the whole is a trick. There is a pretence of sacrificing something for the relief of the poor in hard times, and then the next thing is to render that relief ineffectual, by out-bidding them, by lowering the value of money, by creating artificial wealth, and other methods. If then the rich are so entirely masters of the price of labour that they can render it real or nominal as they please, and take good care never to lose by it in the end, I should like to know how this most important political barometer has any relation to real plenty or want: how it expresses any thing more than the will of the rich and great; or the miserable pittance they are willing to allow out of the support of their own extravagant and ostentatious establishments to the maintainance of the mass of the people. It does indeed express the relation between the supply of provisions, and the demand for them, &c. supposing that a certain number of people are to consume four or five times as much (either in quantity or quality) as the others: and that this proportion is unalterable and one of the laws of nature. It further expresses the wants of the society respecting population, while this division continues, or that degree of poverty beyond which it is impossible for people to subsist at all. The object in a scarcity is not however to stop the ordinary process of population, but to alleviate the distresses of those already in existence, by a more equal distribution of the real funds for the maintainance of labour. By these funds Mr. Malthus means any arbitrary division of the produce of the ground, which the rich find it convenient to make, and which the poor are forced to take up with as better than nothing. But the real funds for the maintenance of labour are the produce of labour. According to Mr. Malthus, they are not the produce itself, but what happens to be left of it, as the husks only and not the corn are given to the swine.