Michael Thomas Sadler, M.P., 1780–1835, a native of Snelston, Derbyshire, for some time a merchant of Leeds, was M.P. for Newark-upon-Trent, 1829, and again in 1830 and in 1831 for Aldborough, Yorkshire. He was noted for his philanthropic interest on behalf of the agricultural poor and the children in factories, and his opposition to Roman Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. 1. “Ireland: its Evils and their Remedies,” London, 1828, 8vo…. 2. “Speech on the State and Prospects of the Country, delivered at Whitby,” 1829, 8vo. Ridiculed by Edinburgh Review, 50, 344. “The Law of Population: a Treatise, in Six Books, in Disproof of the Superfecundity of Human Beings, and Developing the Real Principle of their Increase,” 1830, 2 vols. 8vo. Vol. iii. never appeared.
Personal
Sadler is a loss; he might not be popular in the house, or in London society, but his speeches did much good in the country, and he is a singularly able, right-minded, and religious man. Who is there that will take up the question of our white slave-trade with equal feeling?
His fame, however, is of a higher class than that of a parliamentarian. His was the hand which, after a hundred fruitless attempts, and those by men of no mean rank—his was the hand that threw down, and broke to pieces, and stamped into powder, that Moloch principle, long worshipped as an idol by many, of the superfecundity of the human species. The Malthusian theory was by him, at once and for ever, put an end to. It is true that the numerous disciples of that heresy will still adhere to it “for the term of their natural lives.” But it is now a detected imposture, and its fate is sealed…. He was a man of rare natural endowments, and of extraordinary accomplishments; but these qualities could only be known in their variety, to his private circle and friends. His enthusiastic devotion to the welfare of the poor was the leading feature of his character; and in this point his value was felt and appreciated by the people generally. We perceive that the men of Leeds are claiming the honour of rearing and possessing his monument. But there must be a record of his labours and his doings, of a more extensive and durable character than a local column, or tablet, or statue. Seldom has a nobler subject for the pen of the biographer been afforded, and we are glad to hear that it will not be allowed to pass unnoticed.
Michael Thomas Sadler was a good speaker—too fond, sometimes, of the abomination of delivering cut-and-dry orations which he had carefully elaborated beforehand. His delivery was good, and his language not only clear, but elegant.
Sadler’s brief public life deeply impressed his contemporaries. He was one of those philanthropic statesmen whose inspiration may be traced to the evangelical movement and the necessities of the industrial revolution. He did not believe in any purely political remedy for the discontent caused by the unregulated growth of the factory system, but underrated the need for political reform, and was too sanguine in his belief that the territorial aristocracy would realise the necessity of social readjustments, and force the needed changes on the manufacturing element of the middle class. He met with as much opposition from his own side as from his opponents. Lloyd Jones, who knew him well, bore testimony to his eloquence, marked ability, and “modest honesty of purpose plain to the eye of the most careless observer in every look and action of the man.”
The Law of Population, 1830
We did not expect a good book from Mr. Sadler: and it is well that we did not; for he has given us a very bad one. The matter of his treatise is extraordinary; the manner more extraordinary still. His arrangement is confused, his repetitions endless, his style everything which it ought not to be. Instead of saying what he has to say with the perspicuity, the precision, and the simplicity in which consists the eloquence proper to scientific writing, he indulges without measure in vague, bombastic declamation, made up of those fine things which boys of fifteen admire, and which everybody who is not destined to be a boy all his life, weeds vigorously out of his compositions after five-and-twenty. That portion of his two thick volumes which is not made up of statistical tables, consists principally of ejaculations, apostrophes, metaphors, similes,—all the worst of their respective kinds. His thoughts are dressed up in this shabby finery with so much profusion and so little discrimination, that they remind us of a company of wretched strolling players, who have huddled on suits of ragged and faded tinsel, taken from a common wardrobe, and fitting neither their persons nor their parts; and who then exhibit themselves to the laughing and pitying spectators, in a state of strutting, ranting, painted, gilded beggary. The spirit of this work is as bad as its style.
His book is a most important one. He has trampled upon Malthus’s theory, proving its absurdity and falsehood.
Mr. Sadler, on whom his Godfathers bestowed the most just of all epithets by the most prophetic of all initials—Mr. M. T. (commonly pronounced Empty) Sadler, has lately published a book in opposition to the followers of Malthus; the size of it is very remarkable.
Quite unworthy of the subject.
His very able work.
Mr. Sadler was an ardent benevolent man, an impracticable politician, and a florid speaker. His literary pursuits and oratorical talents were honourable and graceful additions to his character as a man of business, but in knowledge and argument he was greatly inferior to Malthus and Ricardo.
