Joseph Townsend

The English Poor Laws that provided the public relief from the end of the 1500s well into the 1800s generated heated debate among intellectuals of the time, among them Joseph Townsend (1739–1816). Townsend was a man of many talents—physician, geologist, Methodist clergyman. His Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Well-Wisher to Mankind was published in 1786, twelve years before Thomas Malthus’s famous Essay on the Principle of Population. Though Townsend’s work is void of the moralizing that appears in Malthus’s later work, it makes many of the same points. A principal point, which he makes in the following viewpoint, is that welfare destroys the motivation to succeed and leads to excess population and misery.

As you read, consider the following questions:

1. How are population levels...