But, if you can restrain your indignation at these insolent notions and schemes, with what feelings must you look upon the condition of your country, where the increase of the people is now looked upon as a curse!  Thus, however, has it always been, in all countries where taxes have produced excessive misery.  Our countryman, Mr. Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, has the following passage:  ’The horrid practice of murdering their new-born infants was become every day more frequent in the provinces.  It was the effect of distress, and the distress was principally occasioned by the intolerable burden of taxes, and by the vexatious as well as cruel prosecutions of the officers of the revenue against their insolvent debtors.  The less opulent or less industrious part of mankind, instead of rejoicing at an increase of family, deemed it an act of paternal tenderness to release the children from the impending miseries of a life which they themselves were unable to support.’

But that which took place under the base Emperor Constantine will not take place in England.  You will not murder your new-born infants, nor will you, to please the corrupt and insolent, debar yourselves from enjoyments to which you are invited by the very first of Nature’s laws.  It is, however, a disgrace to the country that men should be found in it capable of putting ideas so insolent upon paper.  So, then, a young man arm-in-arm with a rosy-cheeked girl must be a spectacle of evil omen!  What! and do they imagine that you are thus to be extinguished, because some of you are now (without any fault of yours) unable to find work?  As far as you were wanted to labour, to fight, or to pay taxes, you were welcome, and they boasted of your numbers; but now that your country has been brought into a state of misery, these corrupt and insolent men are busied with schemes for getting rid of you.  Just as if you had not as good a right to live and to love and to marry as they have!  They do not propose, far from it, to check the breeding of sinecure placemen and pensioners, who are supported in part by the taxes which you help to pay.  They say not a word about the whole families who are upon the pension list.  In many cases there are sums granted in trust for the children of such a lord or such a lady.  And while labourers and journeymen who have large families too, are actually paying taxes for the support of these lords’ and ladies’ children, these cruel and insolent men propose that they shall have no relief, and that their having children ought to be checked!  To such a subject no words can do justice.  You will feel as you ought to feel; and to the effect of your feelings I leave these cruel and insolent men.