ng to Mr Mill, establish an aristocracy of wealth,
and leave the community without protection and exposed to all the evils
of unbridled power. Most willingly would we stake the whole controversy
between us on the success of the experiment which we propose.

*****

SADLER'S LAW OF POPULATION. (July 1830.)

"The Law of Population; a Treatise in Six Books, in Disproof
of the Superfecundity of Human Beings, and developing the
real Principle of their Increase". By Michael Thomas
Sadler, M.P. 2 volumes 8vo. London: 1830.

We did not expect a good book from Mr Sadler: and it is well that we did
not; for he has given us a very bad one. The matter of his treatise is
extraordinary; the manner more extraordinary still. His arrangement is
confused, his repetitions endless, his style everything which it ought
not to be. Instead of saying what he has to say with the perspicuity,
the precision, and the simplicity in which consists the eloquence proper
to scientific writing, he indulges without measure in vague, bombastic
declamation, made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire,
and which everybody, who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds
vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty. That portion
of his two thick volumes which is not made up of statistical tables,
consists principally of ejaculations, apostrophes, metaphors,
similes,--all the worst of their respective kinds. His thoughts are
dressed up in this shabby finery with so much profusion and so little
discrimination, that they remind us of a company of wretched strolling
players, who have huddled on suits of ragged and faded tinsel, taken
from a common wardrobe, and fitting neither their persons nor their
parts; and who then exhibit themselves to the laughing and pitying
spectators, in a state of strutting, ranting, painted, gilded beggary.
"Oh, rare Daniels!" "Political economist, go and do thou likewise!"
"Hear, ye political economists and anti-populationists!" "Population, if
not proscribed and worried down by the Cerberean dogs of this wretched
and cruel system, really does press against the level of the means of
subsistence, and still elevating that level, it continues thus to
urge society through advancing stages, till at length the strong
and resistless hand of necessity presses the secret spring of human
prosperity, and the portals of Providence fly open, and disclose to the
enraptured gaze the promis