alternative have you to offer, if you shut up their path across the sea? During the last five or six years, the emigration from Ireland has been a little over 90,000 a year; nearly one half of that emigration, therefore, has merely harmonized with the mechanical law, which only permits the introduction of water at one end of a pipe by the expulsion of a corresponding volume at the other.
In all parts of the world similar processes are occurring, and it is absurd to talk of Ireland, as the only country from which an extensive emigration has proceeded. From Germany alone, and principally from the North and West of Germany, as many as 250,000 persons have emigrated in a single year,[1] while between 1851 and 1861, even from
- ↑ To those who will only regard emigration as the exponent of landlord cruelty, I would suggest that inasmuch as a very considerable emigration has been taking place from countries where these evil influences do not prevail, it may not be unreasonable to suppose that some one or other of those natural causes, which are noted by M. Jules Duval in his History of Emigration, as having occasioned emigration from Germany, viz.: a difficulty of procuring subsistence at home, low wages, bad harvests, an excessive subdivision of the land, and the attraction of the gold fields, have also promoted emigration from Ireland.
It has been objected that the population of Germany is 40,000,000, and the population of Ireland only 5,500,000; but in Germany 30,000,000 of people did not subsist on the potato, and the failure of the potato in Germany was not the same
upon an acre of potatoes for their annual subsistence, will facilitate any humane measure which may be applied with a view to placing them where their labour may afford a more certain means of livelihood."—Dig. Devon Commission, Summary, p. 321.
