ical Register_, 29th Jan. 1825.

[197] _Protestant Reformation_, p. 13.

[198] _Ibid._ p. 262.

[199] _Advice to Young Men_, p. 8.

[200] _Political Works_, v. 405. If our census be not a lie, there
were twenty-seven million Englishmen in 1891.

[201] _Protestant Reformation_, i. 311.

[202] Coleridge in a letter to Allsop (_Conversations_, etc., i. 20)
approves one of Cobbett's articles, because it popularises the weighty
truth of the 'hollowness of commercial wealth.' Cobbett, he sadly
reflects, is an overmatch for Liverpool. See Cobbett's _Political
Works_, v. 466 _n._

CHAPTER IV

MALTHUS

I. MALTHUS'S STARTING-POINT

The political movement represented the confluence of many different
streams of agitation. Enormous social changes had generated
multifarious discontent. New wants and the new strains and stresses
between the various parts of the political mechanism required new
adaptations. But, if it were inquired what was the precise nature of
the evils, and how the reform of parliament was to operate, the most
various answers might be given. A most important line of division did
not coincide with the line between the recognised parties. One wing of
the Radicals agreed with many Conservatives in attributing the great
evils of the day to the industrial movement and the growth of
competition. The middle-class Whigs and the Utilitarians were, on the
contrary, in thorough sympathy with the industrial movement, and
desired to limit the functions of government, and trust to self-help
and free competition. The Socialistic movement appeared for the
present to be confined to a few dreamers and demagogues. The
Utilitarians might approve the spirit of the Owenites, but held their
schemes to be chimerical. Beneath the political controversies there
was therefore a set of problems to be answered; and the Utilitarian
answer defines their distinction from Radicals of a different and, as
they would have said, unphilosophical school.

What, then, was the view really taken by the Utilitarians of these
underlying problems? They not only had a very definite theory in
regard to them, but in working it out achieved perhaps their most
important contribution to speculation. Beneath a political theory
lies, or ought to lie, what we now call a 'sociology'--a theory of
that structure of society which really determines the character and
the working of political institutions. The Utilitarian theory was
embodied in their po