course, crime and
immorality, multiply around the seats where that wealth was originally
created. And this evil, so far from abating with the lapse of time, daily
increases, and must increase till some dreadful convulsion takes place,
and restores the subverted balance of society; because the power of
capital, like that of a lever which is continually lengthened, is daily
augmenting in the centres of wealth; and the power of numbers in the
centres of destitution is hourly on the increase, from the reckless and
improvident habits which that destitution has engendered.

The happiness of a nation, its morality, order, and security, are mainly,
if not entirely, dependent on the extent to which _property_ with its
attendant blessings, and habits of reflection, regularity, and industry,
are diffused among the people. But the doctrines of the _Chrematists_, and
of nearly the whole school of modern political economists, go almost
entirely to uproot this inestimable blessing. The principle being once
fixed in men's minds, and acted upon by individual men and the
legislature, that the great thing is to diminish the _cost of production_,
it follows, as a very natural consequence, that the main thing is to
diminish the _wages of the producers_. Every thing which can conduce to
that object is vigorously pursued, without the slightest regard to the
effect the changes must have on the fortunes, and ultimate fate in life,
of whole classes in society. It is thus that, in agriculture, the
engrossing of farms takes place--an evil so sorely felt in England during
the seventeenth, and in Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries--and that hundreds and thousands of happy families are
dispossessed from their hereditary possessions, to make room for that
"devourer of the human race," as the old writers called it, the sheep. It
is thus that, in our own times, the small tenants and cotters have been so
generally dispossessed in Scotland and Ireland, to make room for the large
cultivator or store farmer. It is thus that the race of hand-loom weavers,
who carry on their trade in their own houses, and with the advantages of
rural residence, gardens, fields, and country air, is every where becoming
extinct, or their wages have fallen so low as barely to support existence
in the very humblest rank of life. In the room of these sturdy old
children of the soil, has sprung up a race of puny operatives or
labourers, living by wages, and having