Malthus and his work / by James Bonar.

  • James Bonar
Date:
1885
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Malthus and his work / by James Bonar. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    26/452 page 10
    Thanks to human institutions, especially lawyers, sovereigns, and statesmen, the outward circumstances, he says, are as bad as they can be. Everywhere there is inequality. There is great poverty alongside of great riches, and great tyranny with great slavery. In the same way the best of his novels, Caled Williams (1794), tells us how “things as they are” enable the rich sinner to persecute the poor righteous man. But he is no pessimist. The Political Justice does not end with a statement of evils. It goes on to show that in the end truth will conquer; men will listen © to reason, they will abandon their present laws, and they will form a society without law or government or any kind of force; no such things will be needed when every man listens to reason, and contents himself with plain living and high thinking. There will be no king in Israel; every man will do that which is right in his own eyes. In our present society, says Godwin, it is distribution and not production that is at fault. There is more than enough of wealth for all, but it is not shared amongst all. One man has too much, another little or nothing. In the new society reason will change all that. Reason tells us that, if we make an equal division, not only of the good things of this life, but of the labour of making them, then we shall secure a pro- duction quite sufficient for the needs of plain livers, at the cost of perhaps half-an-hour’s labour in a day — from each of them.' Each of them will, therefore, * Pol. Justice, Bk. VIII. ch. vi. p. 484. On the other hand, Franklin, in his Letter on Luxury, Idleness, and Industry (1784), had estimated the -
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