Historical voices

Why not leave them as free to make their own bargains, as the law-makers are to let their farms and houses?

There are two classes of people to whom the laws of England are particularly hostile, and those the most helpless; younger children, and the poor.

One extreme produces the other: to make one rich many must be made poor; neither can the system be supported by other means.

The peer and the beggar are often of the same family.

Every aristocratical family has an appendage of family beggars hanging round it, which in a few ages, or a few generations, are shook off, and console themselves with telling their tale in almshouses, workhouses, and prisons.

Primogeniture ought to be abolished, not only because it is unnatural and unjust, but because the country suffers by its operation.

As hereditary estates, the law has created the evil, and it ought also to provide the remedy.

Let it be sufficient to remedy the evil by putting them in a condition of descending again to the community by the quiet means of apportioning them among all the heirs and heiresses of those families.

But the chief object of this progressive tax (besides the justice of rendering taxes more equal than they are) is, as already stated, to extirpate the overgrown influence arising from the unnatural law of primogeniture, and which is one of…

The aristocracy has screened itself too much, and this serves to restore a part of the lost equilibrium.

The object is not so much the produce of the tax as the justice of the measure.

I know not why any plant or herb of the field should be a greater luxury in one country than another; but an overgrown estate in either is a luxury at all times, and, as such, is the proper object of taxation.

One thing is called a luxury at one time, and something else at another; but the real luxury does not consist in the article, but in the means of procuring it, and this is always kept out of sight.

When taxes are proposed, the country is amused by the plausible language of taxing luxuries.

The tax on houses and windows is one of those direct taxes, which, like the poor-rates, is not confounded with trade; and, when taken off, the relief will be instantly felt.

The haunts of the wretched will be known, because it will be to their advantage; and the number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be lessened.

Widows will have a maintenance for their children, and not be carted away, on the death of their husbands, like culprits and criminals; and children will no longer be considered as increasing the distresses of their parents.

The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish.

The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age, begging for bread.

By the operation of this plan, the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture, will be superseded, and the wasteful expense of litigation prevented.

It is horrid that any man, more especially at the price coals now are, should live on the distresses of a community; and any government permitting such an abuse, deserves to be dismissed.

By establishing an asylum of this kind, such persons to whom temporary distresses occur, would have an opportunity to recruit themselves, and be enabled to look out for better employment.

Hunger is not among the postponable wants, and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition is often the crisis of a life of ruin.

There is no such thing in the country as persons, in the literal sense of the word, starved to death, or dying with cold from the want of a lodging.