of action than benevolence; but they are placed by the Author of our being so near to each other, and the latter principle is so exalted by the great Christian precept into a virtue, that in well-regulated minds the distinction is very difficult to define. Mr. Malthus, with the other wise and good men above cited, strives to overwhelm this moral feeling with subtle and scholastic refinement; and perhaps, on their principles, the earliest moralist who has written on the subject has come to the most natural conclusion, when he confines our sacrifices and exertions for the support and preservation of another within the limits of the necessary attention to our own support and preservation: "Dabo egenti, sed non ut ipse egeam; succurram perituro, sed ut ipse non peream.' Seneca de Beneficiis, lib. ii. c. 15. 99 It is with great diffidence that I offer a solution which places the right, claim, obligation perfect or imperfect, reasonable expectation, or whatever name may be adopted to designate it by, upon a surer ground, consistent with the right of property, the duties of natural, and the precepts of revealed, religion. And I think this solution deducible from the historical view with which I commenced, and the consideration of which, indeed, led me to it; and from the moral feeling, no less a part of the history of the human mind, which breaks forth in the writings of the theore tical writers, who, while they acknowledge the co-existence of the rights of property, and of self-preservation, seem to have always felt the difficulty of reconciling them. The term property is well understood, and requires no particular explanation. But that condition in civil society, wherein a human being, having exerted all honest endeavours to procure subsistence; or wherein, by age, sickness, or unavoidable calamity, he is rendered incapable of exerting them; would, in obedience to the great law of self-preservation, be justified in invading the right of property, I have hitherto, with a view of limiting the meaning of terms, denominated indigence; and this word, which, adopted from the Latin, has a similar or rather more intense meaning than the word egestas, admits with that a perfect distinction from poverty on one hand, and mendicity on the other*. Poverty is compatible with honesty and respectability; indigence with the former; but mendicity with neither, and is, indeed, the first step to dishonesty. The view which moralists seem hitherto to have taken of the subject, implies the existence "Itaque istam paupertatem vel potius egestatem et mendicitatem tuam nunquam obscure tulisti."-Cicero in Paradoxis, 6. Charity consists in relieving the indigent."- Addison, quoted in Johnson's Dictionary in verbo. of only two parties*,-the possessor of property, and the indigent person; forgetting, that as property must imply sovereign power to protect it, there must exist a third party, in general reasoning, denominated the state, whose intervention will, perhaps, tend to reconcile these anomalies. In that state of society where property has once taken place, as all cannot be possessors, some must of necessity be without it, and therefore indigent. But all the subjects of a state have equally a right to its protection: those who have property, to the protection of property; those who have nothing but life, to the preservation of it. And I so far agree with Grotius, that, in submitting to the restraints of civil society, the tendency of which is the amelioration of his condition, man did not resign the great right of self-preservation; which Burlamaqui calls unalienable. The state is, therefore, justified in applying its revenues to the preservation of the life of its indigent subjects. But the revenues of the "Doslinages solos hay en el mundo, como decia una àgüela mia, que son el tener y el no tener, aunque ella al del tener se atenia.".”—Don Quixote, iii. 252. "The world (says Sancho Panza) is divided into only two families, The Have-somethings, and The Have-nothings. My old Grandmother, who gave me this piece of information, always stuck to the Have-somethings." Thus some of the principles of the Modern Philosophy are neither new in their origin, nor, perhaps, in their application. Do Modern Philosophers prefer making their doctrines palatable to the Have-somethings at the expense of the Have-nothings? state, as such, can be only derived from the possessors of property; and therefore I conclude, that, through the intervention of the state, the INDIGENT have a RIGHT to relief from the possessors of property*. Puffendorf, in another of his works, seems to admit this right of the indigent to relief from the state; and, indeed, in the passage of his larger work, above quoted, he subjoins, that the mode of remedy is by application to the magistrate: and in times of scarcity, when the number of the indigent must naturally be augmented in a state, he justifies a recourse to violent measures on the part of the indigent against property for the preservation of life, only on the supposition that the magistrate has neglected his duty in making proper provision for this exigency. "Right and duty," says one of the best writers on the subject, "are, as the logicians speak, correlative terms. One of these ideas necessarily supposes the other; and it is impossible to conceive a right, without at the same time conceiv * See the extracts from the Discourses of Nicolę. Poulle: Sermon sur l'Aumone. Bossuet-Panegyrique de St. François, in Levizac, Bibliotheque Portative, vol. i. p. 164–169. † “Quanquam autem summi imperantes subditos alere non teneantur, nisi quod eorum qui per immeritam aliquam calamitatem seipsos sustentare non possunt, peculiarem curam agere caritas jubet."-De Officio Hominis, 1. 2. c. 11. "Si summa urgeat necessitas. magistratus."-Lib. 3. c. 6. adeatur "Some men dis ing a correspondent duty*." like all discussion of competency and rights: I cannot agree with them; right and obligation are correlative terms, and unless we understand what is right, how can we understand our obligation not to do wrong. To guard my proposition as much as possible from a confusion of terms, I refer to the definition of indigence in a former page; and the result of my view of this theory may be thus expressed, "That the INDIGENT have a RIGHT to relief from the state, in civilized society." In strict conformity to this principle, which I hold to be founded on the great law of nature, when applied to a state of civil society, is that clause of the 43d Eliz. c. 2, "which directs that a tax be raised to provide competent sums for and toward the necessary relief of the lame, impotent, old, blind, and such other among them, being poor and not able to work;" and on this clause, which reduces the general principle into municipal law, I rest as a landmark in English legislation. There are two other purposes, towards which the sums to be raised are directed to be applied, which I shall notice, after I have discussed the objections which have been made to this now under consideration. Burlamaqui, chap. 7. p. 6. |