Malthus had raised a specter which could be neither ignored nor laid. ...

Malthus had raised a specter which could be neither ignored nor laid. More immediately significant than the growth of population was its aggregation in great towns.

Down to the French Wars the moral habit of society was definitely patrician and rural, and had still much of the ease, the tolerance, and the humour which belongs to a life lived in security and not divorced from nature. What differences existed in the lives and outlook of a gentleman, a yeoman, and a cottager were mitigated by their common subjection to the ebb and flow of the world, the seasons, and the hours.

In correspondence with its traditional structure, the traditional culture and morality of England were based on the patriarchal village family of all degrees: the father worked, the mother saw to the house, the food, and the clothes; from the parents the children learnt the crafts and industries necessary for their livelihood, and on Sundays they went together, great and small, to worship in the village church. To this picture English sentiment clung, as Roman sentiment saw in the Sabine farm the home of virtue and national greatness.