force and ultimate victory of TRUTH, and firmly persuaded of its beneficial tendency, I augur well of the struggle which is now going on, and entertain sanguine expectations of its result.

This little work is an attempt to aid the solution of the great problem now undergoing such general discussion. It is offered as an humble contribution towards the great fund of knowledge now in process of accumulation, (and dispersed as fast as accumulated,) on the principles of social welfare. It directs itself especially to investigate and explain the laws that determine the supply of a people with the necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of physical existence. It is this branch in particular of the science (if so it may be called) of social happiness, which appears to the writer to be at present, if not the most neglected, at all events the least understood in theory, and the most mismanaged in practice.

The character of nearly all governments is undergoing a rapid improvement, even where their forms remain unchanged. The welfare of the people is now universally acknowledged as the only legitimate end of state policy. The spirit of conquest and the mad thirst after military glory have subsided before the humanizing influence of a lengthened personal, literary, and commercial intercourse between nations. Education has taken rapid strides in almost every quarter, and is

quickly dispelling the bigotry and intolerance which cunning had engrafted upon ignorance. The press, the organ at once and the guide of public opinion, has widely extended its peaceful but powerful sway. A community of thought and feeling, a sense of kinsmanship and common interest, a kind of cosmopolitan sympathy, is establishing itself among bodies of men in every region of the globe; and millions of hearts now vibrate to the same chord, in conscious unison, from the Mississippi to the Ganges, from Torneo to the Cape. The number of minds everywhere occupied in the investigation of useful subjects, and the means afforded for the intercommunication of their respective discoveries, has prodigiously multiplied. Art, science and literature have made, and are daily making, corresponding-advances. The mechanical arts, especially, have moved forward with unexampled celerity; invention has succeeded invention, until the facilities for producing objects which shall minister to the ever-varying tastes and ever-augmenting wants of man, seem almost boundless.

Still, amidst these bright and promising prospects, some gloomy shadows are visible. Something still disturbs these elements of general improvement, neutralizes their beneficial qualities, and hinders them from combining, as might be expected, to work out a general and

uniform advance in happiness. Wealth, it is true, has increased in certain quarters; but poverty, on the other hand, has increased likewise, or, at least, has not proportionately diminished. There is almost everywhere an actually overflowing supply of articles of luxury and refinement. But there is, at the same time, almost everywhere, an ominous and anomalous want of the very necessaries of subsistence. Knowledge is increasing; discoveries in art and science are adding daily to the stock of superfluities; while food, the staff of life, seems to be stationary, not to say retrograde, in the rate of its supply.

This is not as it should be. There is something wrong

'When wealth accumulates as men decay.' It is not merely an unhappy and a dangerous, it is an unnatural and paradoxical state of things. It can only be the result of culpable mismanagement, mismanagement having its root either in the fraud or the ignorance of those who model the institutions, and administer the resources of nations. Ignorance, rather than fraud, we believe to be the main root of the evil. No statesman, no despot even, in the present day, sets to work knowingly to destroy his country and deteriorate the condition of the people under his sway, for his own selfish purposes. It is well understood now that the interest of the governor lies in the

well-being of the governed; that political discontents have their origin in physical distresses; that the ease, the power, the wealth, the glory, of a government depend on the prosperity of the nation it presides over. It is to the ignorance then of both governors and governed, as to the just direction of their collective resources, and the true principles of economical policy; to the blundering stupidity of power, rather than to its knavery and wickedness, that we must trace the defective arrangements, and consequently imperfect operation of the mechanism of most existing societies.

This ignorance, like that of every other kind, is to be dispelled by inquiry and discussion. The rules for securing the physical well-being of communities are simple, and, when sought in a spirit of candour, almost self-evident. The writer has endeavoured to clear the subject from the abstruse and unnecessary mystification in which it has been shrouded of late by some of its more popular expounders; and to bring its leading principles within the comprehension of readers of all classes possessed of plain common-sense understandings.

It has been thought advisable to introduce the strictly economical part of the subject, by a preliminary discourse on the rights, duties, and interests of man in society, for the sake both of thereby defining with greater accuracy the true

scope and limits of political economy; and also of establishing a ground-work of axiomatic principles, with respect to the rights of individuals and the duties of governments, resting upon which the maxims of political economy assume the character, not of mere curious and interesting speculations, but of rules of imperative duty on the part of governments, and of unquestionable right on the part of the governed.

6

One primary object which the writer has had in view, in this as well as in other previous publications, he acknowledges to be the refutation of that most pernicious dogma which has long been palmed upon the public as the fundamental axiom of political economy: namely, the tendency of population to exceed the procurable means of subsistence.' His desire has been to demonstrate, in opposition to the heartless and paralyzing doctrines which this chimera has engendered, that man's deficiency of subsistence is his own wilful fault, that, in his aggregate capacity, he has everywhere and always had within reach the sources of an abundant supply for the satisfaction of all his reasonable wants; and that, so far from any artificial limitation of numbers being needed in the present mid-day blaze of knowledge applicable to the improvement of his productive powers, nothing more is wanting, in order to secure a continual increase of the means of physical enjoy