Again, it is asked, what is to become of the manufacturing industry of Great Britain if the normal flow of Irish labour should suddenly run dry? How are the armies of England to be recruited if the magic shilling no longer has attractions for the Irish peasant?
With such ill-omened surmises as these I have no sympathy. However serious the contingencies suggested, it is very certain the solution must be sought elsewhere than in the maintenance of a fourth of the population of Ireland at starving point. A perennial flow of cheap labour into Lancashire and of broken Irishmen into the Queen's service, means perennial indigence and discontent in Munster and Connaught;—and discontent in her Southern provinces means the perpetual abstraction from the available forces of the Empire of a garrison nearly as large as the military contingent furnished by all Ireland. To foster, therefore, an excess of population with the intention of forcing the most desperate of their numbers to
will abundantly fulfil the behests of his Maker if he causes the wilderness to become the home of civilized man. This world was made for the occupation of the human race, and it never could be intended that fertile soils should grow nothing but rank and useless vegetation. It never could be intended that rivers which might stimulate production of untold wealth should always continue to flow through solitudes; it never could be intended, we may unhesitatingly say, that scenes should continue to be viewed by no human eye, which are so beautiful, that their contemplation must make man look from Nature up to Nature's God."—The Economic Position of the British Labourer, by Henry Fawcett, M.P., p. 209.
