‘Adieu! You will repent provoking me to write.
‘J. Symonds.’
From Jeremy Bentham, Esq., on the poor, &c.
‘Queen Square, Westminster: Sept. 8, 1797.
‘Dear Sir,—It was but the other day that I became master of a complete series of your “Annals of Agriculture;” accept my confession and record my penitence. Having on my return from my long peregrination on the Continent lent to a friend—who had lent to another friend, whom we neither of us could recollect—the twenty-five or thirty numbers which I had taken in before that period, I postponed from time to time the completion of the series in hopes of recovering the commencement of it. When at last shame and necessity got the better of procrastination, what a treasure of information burst upon me. No—so long as power without ——— and without ——— shall have left an annual guinea in my pocket (blanks are better here than words) not a number of the “Annals” shall ever be wanting to my shelves. Hold—don’t take me for a Jacobin now, nor even for a croaker. What I allude to is not any common burden, such as you land-owners and land-holders grunt under, but my own ten thousand pound tax—my privilegium—a thing as new to English language as it is to English practice—sole and peculiar fruit of the very particular notice with which I have been honoured by ———.
‘This waits upon you with a proof of a blank pauper population table, framed for the purpose of collecting an account of them in as many parishes as I can. Knowing so well your zeal for all zeal-worthy objects, and mindful of your often experienced kindness, I cannot on this occasion harbour a doubt of your assistance. Is it worth while to give the table the indiscriminate circulation of your "Annals"? At any rate your editorial Majesty will, I hope, be pleased graciously to grant unto me your royal letters, patent or close, or both, addressed to all, and if need be, singular, your loving subjects my fellow correspondents; charging and exhorting them, each in his parish—and as many other parishes as may be—to fill my tables and send in their contributions.
‘Along with the table you will find a MS. paper, exhibiting the importance of the information I am thus labouring to collect; you will print it or suppress it as you think best. I also send in MS. a table of cases calling for relief; a general map of pauper land with all the roads to it. Few, if any, of the projects I have seen but what have appeared (the arch-project not excepted) to bear an exclusive—at least a predilective—reference to some of these cases, overlooking or slighting the rest. I send it in the state in which I propose printing it for my own book; but, in the meantime, if it be worthy the honour of a place in the “Annals,” it is altogether at your service. This preparatory insertion will turn to the advantage of the work itself, if any of your correspondents (not forgetting their editor) would have the goodness to contribute their remarks to the emendation of it. You will not easily conceive—few heads, at least, but yours are qualified to conceive—the labour it has cost me to bring the two tables to this state. As to the work at large, it will occupy two independent, though connected volumes. Pauper systems compared; pauper management improved—the last the romance, the Utopia, to which I had once occasion to allude. Romance? How could it be anything less? I mean to an author’s partial eye. In proportion as a thing is excellent, when established, is it anything but romance, and theory, and speculation, till the touch of the seal or the sceptre has converted it into practice. Distress, at least, distress, the very life and soul of romance, cannot be denied to mine; for in this short and close-packed specimen already you behold it in all its shapes. Magnanimous president! accomplished secretary! ye, too, have your romance. Heaven send you a happy catastrophe and a fettered land “a happy deliverance.” Patience! patience! ye too, before you are comforted, must bear to be tormented.
‘Apropos of presidents. The high priest of Ceres, having divined or not divined my recent occupations, has been pleased to send me a mandate in form, summoning me to devote myself to this branch of his goddess’s service, that the fruit of my labours may be consecrated in her temple at Whitehall; so that whatever other requisites may fail me, I shall be in no want of auspices.
‘I fear you will say to yourself that the Observations[[186]] I have sent you are a sad farrago, but your miscellany, how superior soever to others in subject-matter and contents, has this in common with them, that half-formed ideas, so they have but matter in them, are not prohibited from presenting themselves. It is part of the character of your correspondents to have more of substance about them than of form; and of the many recommendations which join in drawing so much good company to your conversazione, one, nor that the least, is the convenience of being admitted to it in boots. Mine (you will say) have hobnails in them; for, somehow or other, the very idea of the person to whom I am addressing myself has insensibly betrayed me into that sort of playful confidence—that épanchement, as I think the French call it—which I have always felt in his company.
‘Believe me, with the most serious respect,