ared, that from the inevitable laws of our nature
some human beings must suffer from want. These are the unhappy persons
who, in the great lottery of life, have drawn a blank. The number of
these claimants would soon exceed the ability of the surplus produce to
supply. Moral merit is a very difficult distinguishing criterion,
except in extreme cases. The owners of surplus produce would in general
seek some more obvious mark of distinction. And it seems both natural
and just that, except upon particular occasions, their choice should
fall upon those who were able, and professed themselves willing, to
exert their strength in procuring a further surplus produce; and thus
at once benefiting the community, and enabling these proprietors to
afford assistance to greater numbers. All who were in want of food
would be urged by imperious necessity to offer their labour in exchange
for this article so absolutely essential to existence. The fund
appropriated to the maintenance of labour would be the aggregate
quantity of food possessed by the owners of land beyond their own
consumption. When the demands upon this fund were great and numerous,
it would naturally be divided in very small shares. Labour would be ill
paid. Men would offer to work for a bare subsistence, and the rearing
of families would be checked by sickness and misery. On the contrary,
when this fund was increasing fast, when it was great in proportion to
the number of claimants, it would be divided in much larger shares. No
man would exchange his labour without receiving an ample quantity of
food in return. Labourers would live in ease and comfort, and would
consequently be able to rear a numerous and vigorous offspring.

On the state of this fund, the happiness, or the degree of misery,
prevailing among the lower classes of people in every known state at
present chiefly depends. And on this happiness, or degree of misery,
depends the increase, stationariness, or decrease of population.

And thus it appears, that a society constituted according to the most
beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with benevolence for its
moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition
in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the
inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man,
in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a
plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every