s,) tell his readers,
that, if such a man simply replaced his own consumption, having no
surplus whatever or increment for the public capital, he could not be
considered a useful citizen? Not the beast in the Revelation is held
up by Coleridge as more hateful to the spirit of truth than the
Jacobite baronet. And yet we know of an author--viz. one S.T.
Coleridge--who repeated that same doctrine without finding any evil in
it. Look at the first part of the _Wallenstein_, where Count Isolani
having said, "Pooh! we are _all_ his subjects," _i. e._ soldiers,
(though unproductive labourers,) not less than productive peasants,
the emperor's envoy replies--"Yet with a difference, general;" and the
difference implies Sir James's scale, his vine-dresser being the
equatorial case between the two extremes of the envoy.--Malthus again,
in his population-book, contends for a mathematic difference between
animal and vegetable life, in respect to the law of increase, as
though the first increased by geometrical ratios, the last by
arithmetical! No proposition more worthy of laughter; since both, when
permitted to expand, increase by geometrical ratios, and the latter by
much higher ratios. Whereas, Malthus persuaded himself of his crotchet
simply by refusing the requisite condition in the vegetable case, and
granting it in the other. If you take a few grains of wheat, and are
required to plant all successive generations of their produce in the
same flower-pot for ever, of course you neutralise its expansion by
your own act of arbitrary limitation.[25] But so you would do, if you
tried the case of _animal_ increase by still exterminating all but
one replacing couple of parents. This is not to try, but merely a
pretence of trying, one order of powers against another. That was
folly. But Coleridge combated this idea in a manner so obscure, that
nobody understood it. And leaving these speculative conundrums, in
coming to the great practical interests afloat in the Poor Laws,
Coleridge did so little real work, that he left, as a _res integra_,
to Dr Alison, the capital argument that legal and _adequate_ provision
for the poor, whether impotent poor or poor accidentally out of work,
does not extend pauperism--no, but is the one great resource for
putting it down. Dr Alison's overwhelming and _experimental_
manifestations of that truth have prostrated Malthus and his
generation for ever. This comes of not attending to the Latin
maxim--"_Hoc_