I say nothing to the policy of the provision for the
poor, in all the variety of faces under which it presents itself. This
is the matter of another inquiry. I only just speak of it as of a fact,
taken with others, to support me in my denial that hitherto any one of
the ordinary sources of the increase of mankind is dried up by this war.
I affirm, what I can well prove, that the waste has been less than the
supply. To say that in war no man must be killed is to say that there
ought to be no war. This they may say who wish to talk idly, and who
would display their humanity at the expense of their honesty or their
understanding. If more lives are lost in this war than necessity
requires, they are lost by misconduct or mistake: but if the hostility
be just, the error is to be corrected, the war is not to be abandoned.
That the stock of the common people, in numbers, is not lessened, any
more than the causes are impaired, is manifest, without being at the
pains of an actual numeration. An improved and improving agriculture,
which implies a great augmentation of labor, has not yet found itself at
a stand, no, not for a single moment, for want of the necessary hands,
either in the settled progress of husbandry or in the occasional
pressure of harvests. I have even reason to believe that there has been
a much smaller importation, or the demand of it, from a neighboring
kingdom, than in former times, when agriculture was more limited in its
extent and its means, and when the time was a season of profound peace.
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