s argument against
Poor Laws was this syllogism: Whatever weakens the moral restraint
on population must ultimately injure a people; but a legal
protection against destitution weakens that moral restraint;
therefore Poor Laws, giving that legal protection, must ultimately
injure any people among whom they are enforced. The answer, as I
conceive, is simply 'Negatur minor.' How do you know that a legal
protection against destitution must necessarily weaken moral
restraint? The only answer that I have ever seen, amounts only to
an _assertion_ or conjecture, that more young persons will marry,
when they know that they may claim from the law protection against
death by cold and hunger, than when they have no such protection.
But this is only _an opinion_, supported perhaps by reference to a
few individual cases, but resting on no foundation of statistical
facts. Where are the facts to prove that early marriages are more
frequent, and that population becomes more redundant, among those
who have a legal provision against destitution, than among those
who have none? I have never seen any such facts, on such a scale
as is obviously necessary to avoid the fallacies attending
individual observations; and the facts to which I have now to
advert, are on a scale, the extent of which we must all deplore,
and all tending, like many others formerly stated, to prove that
the greatest redundancy of population in her Majesty's dominions
exists among those portions of her subjects who have hitherto
enjoyed _no legal protection_, against destitution. As it is
generally avowed that it is for the sake of the poor
themselves,--with a view to their ultimate preservation from the
evils of destitution,--that the law giving them protection in the
meantime is opposed, these facts must be regarded as decisive of
the question."

It will not generally be disputed that a correct view of the main
cause of distress is contained in what follows:--

"The famine, consequent on the failure of the potato crop in 1846,
considered independently of disease, presents a still more
remarkable collection of facts, the proper view of which appears
to me to be this. The potato is an article of diet throughout the
whole of this country, particularly useful to the working classes,
and its importance to them seems to be fully illust