The circumstance that within one single quarter of the century food imports tripled in value is passed over as unimportant by the framers of fantastic calculations of freights, "almost wholly profit to this country"; once so high that all that had ships in the sea were made rich by the homeward traffic; and who ignore on the one hand that these cargoes promptly disappear down British throats, on the other that there are heavy sets-off against such gains; called seamen's wages, stores, foreign port dues, losses, repairs, depreciation, interest on capital, invested or borrowed (a serious item when steamers are, as usually happens, heavily mortgaged), often by or from foreign capitalists, though the ships may sail under our flag. But, having decided that the tradition of England's wealth must hold good for all time, the opinion is to be maintained in spite of a consensus of impartial opinion, backed by observation and experience, that it has ceased to be true; and in defiance of evidence that while this country is one of the very smallest, it is the most densely peopled, of all civilized States, and contains by far the largest, and an unprecedented, percentage of useless mouths, reckoning as "useless" from the point of view of the political economist, paupers (adults and children), halt, blind, sick, mentally afflicted, criminals, vicious men and women; animals; producing nothing: whose maintenance must in the end be found by producers or toilers.
The only solutions or palliatives for the difficulties that have been sketched, which are propounded by opponents of "the cruel and reckless one of emigration," may be enumerated as Crime, Spade husbandry, Potatoe or Wheat cultivation, and Nationalization of the Land. The last could not help any class, unless confiscation and re-partition are intended, when many
Yet during these fifteen years of stationary exports and diminished yield from the land the population of Great Britain has grown by six millions. That of Ireland has diminished nearly one million, and Ireland accordingly is more prosperous. I beg then to ask whether it is not plain (A.) that Great Britain to-day, with a population of thirty millions, is worse off than in 1866 with twenty-four millions? (B.) That the yield of agricultural products, of manufactures and materials produced for foreign markets even remaining next year and the year after what they are now, while the census of the United Kingdom shall be allowed to rise to thirty-six millions—the nation must be poorer at the close of 1883 than at the end of next month? (C.) And, whatever may have been the true state of matters in 1840—1843, with regard to the problems of population, production, and emigration, how, taking a candid review of all the facts and prospects, can it be possible at this epoch to provide for the fresh mouths we know must be fed in the years to come, otherwise than by reducing the numbers of the people under some 'comprehensive scheme of emigration'?" (Letter to the Right Hon. John Bright, M.P., November 19, 1881).
