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Earth's surface are unfertile, that is, do not bear as indigenous, any wholesome food, or will not bear such without recourse to artifice, to cultivation, and in many instances will not produce it then: and that as man, from organic structure is unsuited for solitude, particularly from infantine helplessness, is gregarious, or inclined to associate with his genus, and by reason of intellect derives pleasurable emotion therefrom; it was to be conjectured, and facts prove the conjecture right, that he would in a state of social compact dwell on or near the spots where he found food indigenous, or where by the aid of art discovered by observation, I mean cultivation, he could most easily raise such food; and if locally necessary, also such coverings from the inclemency of the elements. And, lastly, I submit as a consequent drawn from these precedents, that as man is mortal, and after constituting a part of universal matter and motion for a limited period, loses the onceproperties of his being; is decomposed as an animal, and in turn succeeded here by his own offspring, a part of his own organic matter, and therefore inheriting the same natural rights so appertaining to him; he cannot by Natural Right acquire any control over any part of the reservoir of food and clothing

before-mentioned, for a longer period than the term of his own animal existence; but by the terms of such existence loses such his portion, the instant he parts with that very being, to which at his production it was annexed as an inseparable incident.

Now, granting these data to be founded on abstract principles of truth and right reason; and assuming as incontrovertible the existence of misery and want in the mass of mankind, even in their best state of society; and, be it known to you the latter is asserted to exist in absolute purity in this very city; and of our having seen to-day an exhibition of glaring contrasts, and heard a clash of jarring extremes; of having witnessed an evident excess of possession in one man, of absolute destitution in another; what shall we be bound to declare? to what solemn conclusion are we drawn? to the proof of what existences do all these things tend? to this, and nothing else—that the only natural order of things is positively inverted by means direct and indirect: that there is something unnatural, complex, and wrong, at the bottom of the system; something which never had, nor by any possibility can have any connexion, or reference with the fixed principles of Reason and Nature: which causes the system itself to heave and boil with

action and re-action, like the crater of a volcano: which periodically causes it to burst and overflow, sweeping away its own mounds, absorbing itself in its own vortex; until drained of its tributary waters, it settles into a pool filthy and pestilential, again to become a source of similar catastrophes. And this something is the prodigiously unequal distribution of that birthright of man, the means of subsistence on equal terms, and without interruption from his fellows.

Of the origin and consequences of this state of things, I am now going to treat and explain to you.

LETTER VIII.

BEFORE I proceed to explain the causes and formation of the graduated scale, marked with ranks and degrees, at greater or less intervals, on which all civil society has been hitherto framed; it will be necessary to go back a good way, and notice with as much perspicuity as the subject will admit, the great changes to which our globe has been exposed. I shall not attempt to retrograde farther than the last catastrophe it experienced, being firmly convinced that all history prior to that æra, is a mass of confusion, mere oral tradition and fable. Lapse of time mystifies all things; through that, facts become varied and supplanted; mistaken narration frequently mistaken, without fraudulent intention, from the temperament of the narrator, and but too often wilfully perverted to forward his own views; is substituted for actual truth, and is received current and unsuspected by succeeding generations. I am positive, morally certain, that any fact, trivial or important, which shall happen in our lifetime to-night,

would, in the lapse of only twenty years, be narrated a hundred ways; amplified, modified, by almost every one who should then speak of it, according to his own conception of its probability, of the motives which gave rise to it, aye, according to the frame of mind he might be in at the period of his narration; and according to his knowledge, or ignorance of those to whom he might address himself. And this too in an age when facts are recorded almost at the instant of their taking place, very often by actual spectators, by means of the printing press, in forms of multiplied facsimiles, which seem calculated to put time and error at defiance.. If then these are admitted facts occurring under such advantageous circumstances in modern times, in our own times, so that we ourselves hear their narration; what must we infer respecting events which are said to have taken place four or five thousand years back, at a period when not one jot of natural causation was known; when the transmission of events to posterity was only by word of mouth, or signs called hieroglyphics, which from their nature must be more diffuse than written sounds, which are impressed as vividly, with as many shades of intonation, as if the objects they pourtray were actually visible? Why, we must pursue the

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