That the emigration of the past years has been of the greatest benefit to the laboring classes appears from two obvious circumstances, viz., the decrease of pauperism and the rise of wages.
As regards the first circumstance, a single instance may suffice. In October, 1852, the number of paupers in Ireland receiving relief, external and internal, was 115,810. In the two next years there is a considerable decrease, and in 1855 the country was supporting only 57,731—about half the number it had been maintaining three years before.
As to the other circumstance, the rise of wages, we may refer to the report of the Poor Law Commissioners for 1854. "There is now," say they, "observable a material increase in the money value of agricultural labour, to the extent of about one shilling a week on the average throughout Ireland. It seems, also, that agricultural employment has been more continuous than formerly. It would appear also that in most parts of the country the wages of artizan tradesmen have improved in a still higher ratio than those of the common laborer." Since this report of 1854 a very much larger rise in wages has taken place in every part of the country.[1] In the past year this rise on wages was so striking as to be a matter of common remark. That this increase of wages is an advantage cannot be denied by any who reflect at all with care on the subject. The miserable condition of our countrymen has arisen in great part from this very cause; for in other countries, where the wages of labour are very different, our countrymen are found a different class of men; and why should they not be the same at home, if their labour were remunerated in the same manner? Dr. Johnson defines "oats, a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland it supports the people." The bad food of the Scotchman was the effect of his low wages. The superior food of the Englishman was the effect of his better wages. So it is not the Irishman's mud hut, his potato field, his degraded intellectual and moral condition that cause his wages to be low, but all these wretched peculiarities are evidently their effects; and therefore the returns which show an increase of wages must be regarded as an augury of better things, as the spring and the source from which various good results will spread themselves over the country. These matters clearly show the advantage to our country, under such circumstances, of emigration, and we shall now consider its applicability to our own city.
Of course any one will allow that the new countries are more immediately adapted to our country population, and that the latter are more generally suited to the foreign lands than those who live in our towns. The great business of a new country is agriculture, and therefore the agricultural population of our country must be best adapted to it. But the advantages of emigration do not appear to be confined to these; for when you go into the lanes and alleys of our city you find hundreds starving, who are the very classes described as desirable for the colonies. In a publication printed in
- ↑ For these observations on the rise of wages I am indebted to a valuable Essay on Ireland's Recovery, by Mr. Locke, Fellow of the Statistical Society of London.
