tion will be less; but on the other hand, the facility will be greater. As the earnings of the working classes are larger, the cost of the passage will bear a smaller proportion to the resources of the labourer, and it will therefore be easier for him to accumulate the necessary sum. We cannot expect our harvests to be uniformly good; and when the labourer is better off, as America will be to him more accessible, he will be less patient of any reverse. While wages are actually rising, he will perhaps be disposed to remain; but the first slight turn in the fortunes of the country and the first temporary decline in wages thence arising will set the emigration going more rapidly than now.
Consider, besides, if the terrible struggle now raging in the United States were once at an end, how soon its material effects would be obliterated; with what a bound those states would again rush forward on the career of industry! Look, too, at the magnificent future of industrial progress which is opening before our Canadian and Australian colonies. Is there not every prospect of a continued, nay, an increasing demand for labour? And where, in the presence of these facts, is the probability of the emigration being speedily stayed?
One thing alone will stop the migration to England and Scotland—the equalisation of wages here with wages beyond the channel. One thing alone will stop the emigration to America—the equalisation of wages here with wages beyond the Atlantic.
It is something gained towards a rational view of the emigration, to understand that it is quite independent of the volitions of landlords or of governments—a natural effect of natural causes; and that, therefore, to lament it will be no more effectual than to lament the flowing of the tide. But I say further, that we cannot reasonably regard it with anything but satisfaction. For those who go, it means comparative ease and comfort, as is sufficiently proved by the cheerful letters and the generous remittances of which I have already spoken. For those who remain, it means higher wages and more continuous employment. I think those persons who honestly deplore the emigration do so under the influence of a very common illusion, arising from the softening effect produced by distance in social retrospect as in a physical landscape. While intensely alive to the immediate material inconvenience and moral pain which the emigrants feel in leaving their homes, they forget the far worse miseries which lie but a little way behind us in our national history. They forget the terrible picture of chronic destitution given by the Commissioners of 1834, and repeated, without any alleviation of its gloomy tints, by the Devon Commission of 1845. They forget the 83 per cent. of our rural population who in 1841 were found dwelling in wretched cabins unfit for human habitations.[1] Nay, surely they forget the awful crisis of the famine itself, when they cannot estimate the consequences which our three late disastrous
- ↑ Viz. 43·5 per cent. "living in the lowest state, being possessed of accommodation equivalent to the cabin, consisting but of a single room;" and an additional 40 per cent. "but little removed in comfort." The houses of both classes were generally "built of mud."—Report of Irish Census Commissioners for 1841.
