now, when the awful truth is disclosed to the world, that print coolly inquires, “But why should not the population of Ireland be reduced to four or five millions?" True, indeed! of what account is it that 2,000,000 white souls perish by famine, and disease, and ill usage! 'Of what account is it that four or five millions more still flit between life and death, too sepulchral in their aspect to be deemed living, and yet too restless to be buried! These are only Irish! They are not English enough to claim British rights, nor black enough to excite British sympathy; and if they can no longer contribute to the wealth and splendor of the aristocracy-if they can no longer afford fitting support to the "corinthian columns" of the social fabric of Britain, why should they not perish? One hundred and fifty years of the "credit" and "protective systems" have impoverished the millions to heap up wealth in the coffers of the few. In all that time capital has fed, through protective laws, upon the vitals of the laboring many. The power to produce among an immense number is gone. The pinched bellies and paralyzed arms can no longer produce as much as suffices life, and those miserable many will, unless they perish, become a burden upon capital instead of a means of enhancing it. The protective system reached its maximum in the exhaustion of the laborers. Their ability to produce reached its maximum at the moment when their means of subsistence reached its minimum. Capital had no more to expect. The ingenuity of a pampered aristocracy could devise no laws by which more could be extracted from the used up instruments of wealth. Why, therefore, then should they not perish, and give room for the ample enjoyment of the wealth they have created, but which the protective system transfered to others?

Regarding mankind from its accustomed view, the Times justly puts that question; but the responses may come from a quarter and in tones that will startle the purse-proud and self-sufficient oligarchy amid their dwindling power and diminishing population.

That emigration has had less to do with the depopulation of Ireland than misery, a few figures will make apparent. The reports of the commissioners of emigration give the numbers which left the United Kingdom during the ten years ending with 1840, at 752,315, of these 428,471 were Irish. During the last ten years the emigration reached 1,684,892. And the London Times remarks ::

"The whole emigration from these islands during the last ten years, has been 1,600,000. Of that number it is ascertained that at least 1,100,000 have emigrated from Ireland alone. There is, however, no doubt that of the remaining 500,000, many thousands were Irish, who have only used England as a stepping-stone to the new world."

If on this estimate the odd thousands are allowed to have been Irish, then the whole number from that island will have been 1,184,872, against 500,000 English. On those data we construct the following table:

The increase to 1841 was about 9 per cent. ; a similar rate of increase to 1851 would have given 774,000 more people than in 1841; but there are 892,909 less. These two sums make 1,666,909 souls who perished by

disease and famine. Estimating the population of Great Britain by the same rule, the results are as follows:

Thus the increase of British has been only half as much in the last as in the previous decade. One prominent cause of a diminished rate of increase in the last ten years, was the large emigration of the young and marriageable classes of both sexes. The great staple of a large emigration is just the very class from whom the increase of population is to be expected. The great inducement to a step in itself so perilous and so painful, is the wish to provide for a family coming on, or to settle and marry with some prospect of comfort. The very young, the aged, and invalid remain. Thus the decayed and barren stocks are left behind, and the prolific young shoots are taken away in the fullness of their bearing and growth.

Hence, also, the enormous and increasing gap left in Ireland, deserted, as it is, by the young, the healthy, the able, and the industrious, and resigned to the orphan, the widow, the sick, and the aged. Nor must we forget that this fact is prospective. The six and a half millions remaining in Ireland are not, as a whole, the prolific race that the eight millions and two hundred thousand were in 1841.

Youth, health, vigor, and capital, have emigrated from Ireland along with those 1,200,000 souls, and the miserable remnant is but the debris of a perishing people-the sick, the aged, the cripple, the orphan, the widow, and the penny less and landless vagrant, as destitute of hope as of present means and retrospective joys. That is not the population from whence to expect the large physical aid that England has derived from Ireland in the last century. A recent return of the British army enumerated 41,218 Irishmen as British soldiers; and every branch of British industry has felt the influence of Irish labor, and none more effectually than the agriculturist. The English farmer has hitherto been served with a sort of preternatural laborers, who appeared, at his summons, the very moment the crop was ready, reaped, gathered, and stacked it, with the least possible delay, and then relieved him of their presence for the rest of the year: The poor peasantry of Connaught have hitherto done this service; and there was not in England a more interesting, more picturesque, or, perhaps, we should add, a more painful scene, than one of these industrial pilgrimages from the extreme coasts of Ireland to the seats of English civilization and wealth. A day has arrived when these annual migrations are becoming the subject of history and even of romance. Hitherto they have been too much matters of fact to excite the curiosity they deserve. Few men have considered what must be the condition of Ireland, when she could annually part with some hundred thousand grown-up men for the whole period of the hay and corn harvests; or how precarious the condition of England, when this distant supply had become necessary to her agricultural success. That spirit of enterprise, which urged the rough Celt to compete with the British laborer for the wages of the harvest, now sends him, with little more effort, across the Atlantic. There appears to be scarcely any flagging or pause in the emigration which is fast transfering to the United States the sinew and bone, the skill, and even the capital, of Ireland. It

is evident, therefore, that English agriculturists, such at least as have depended on this assistance, will have to make new arrangements, and change either their mode of cultivation, or their relations with the laboring class.

The pittance earned by these poor peasants, on English harvest fields, made up the rent exacted from them by the landlord at home, for their potato patches, while the low price at which they labored, enabled the English farmer to pay higher rents to his own land oppressor. Connaught, which supplied these reapers, has lost one-third of its population. It contained 1,418,859 souls in 1841, and 1,011,917 in March, 1851. Those able-bodied men, who traversed Ireland annually to sell their labor to English farmers at the lowest price, in order to meet the rapacity of the Irish landlord, and keep the cabin over the head of the little ones; now, many of them, tread their own free farms, upon the unrented and untaxed soil of America. Instead of selling their labor to the British farmer, they compete with him in supplying the English consumer with food. If the aristocratic class here still seeks to fasten its fangs upon his sinews, through protective laws, its power to oppress is gone. In removing cheap Irish labor from the command of the English farmer, the foundation of high rents is sapped, and the British gentry must henceforth consume less of the products of other men's labors. In a new and free country, land is nothing, and labor is everything. In an old country, labor is nothing, and land everything. In this age of intelligence, enterprise is awakened, and the surplus labor of the British Islands freely seeks the surplus land of America; and there exists this difference: it is youth, health, wealth, and energy that comes, while age, disease, poverty and infirmity remain.

The great element of Irish emigration consists, doubtless, in the success of the emigrants. There are at least one-third as many Irish now in the United States as there are in Ireland. The two millions in America are industrious and thrifty; and their earnings, with the peculiarly self-sacrificing generosity of the Irish character, are at the service of their distant relations, and they are availed of to the extent of many millions of dollars per annum for the expenses of emigration. There is no cabin in Ireland where letters from friends in America are not read at least monthly. These letters not only impart joy and hope to a famishing and despairing race, but contain, also, the means of escape from threatened death. The young and the vigorous, from whom hope was being gradually shut out by the want and misery closing around them, suddenly find the door open to them: the pathway to independence, competence and wealth is cleared before them. That they eagerly embrace it, and that every emigration swells the number to whom release is thus thrown, is not to be wondered at; and that it will continue until the nation is expatriated, is not to be doubted. That the English regard this removal of an oppressed race with a certain degree of satisfaction, as effecting the absence of a dangerous (because deeply wronged) race of men, is probable; but that satisfaction should be ameliorated by this fact, viz., that Ireland is within ten days of New-York-that the thousands of Irishmen who emigrate, were, by English laws, deprived of the use of arms. In New-York, two of the best armed and drilled brigades are exclusively Irish, whose devotion to military exercises is enthusiastic. The day may come when those who left Ireland naked in search of bread, may suddenly re-appear to assert their inherent rights upon their native soil.

It will be observed that the bond Irish of Great Britain, and the bond

blacks of America have both alleged incentives to emigration, and both are largely aided by external influences. Thus the means earned in America by the industry and thrift of the emancipated Irish, are the instruments of promoting emigration from that country. In America, voluntary emancipation escapes, and abolition man-stealing, added to the efforts of the free blacks, conspire to diminish the natural increase of the slaves, and enhance that of the free blacks. Yet all these influences are not sufficient to bring down the numerical increase of slaves as low as the highest natural ratio of progression in the most thrifty country of whites, nor do they suffice to maintain the number of free blacks in the northern states, while the efforts of the emancipated Irish serve to transfer a whole nation to other shores. The black, freed from servitude, spends a few years in vicious indolence, until accumulating misery drags him into the grave. The emancipated Irishman who reaches our shores, branded as " turbulent," "lazy," "improvident," "reckless," and "impracticable," begins instantly to rise in the scale of humanity. His "turbulence" manifests itself in submission to the laws he helps to create; his "laziness" is apparent in the multiplying of rail-roads, canals, and edifices, in the construction of which the labor falls on him. His "improvidence" shows itself in means accumulated from small wages, diminished by the sums sent to Ireland for the relief of oppressed friends. His "recklessness" appears in the assiduity with which all the means of advancement within his reach are availed of. His "impracticability" is seen in the yielding of his convictions to the dictates of his expanding reason, and the readiness with which his own rights and those of the community are comprehended and appreciated. There is this difference under British bondage: the Irish nation perishes. by famine and distress; in a state of freedom it flourishes and thrives. Under American bondage the black is prosperous morally and physically; in a state of freedom he is vicious, insolent and miserable.

The present foundation of English power is cheapness of labor. Upon this subject the London Times remarks:

"For a whole generation man has been a drug in this country, and population a nuisance. It has scarcely entered into the heads of economists that they would ever have to deal with a deficiency of labor. The inexhaustible Irish supply has kept down the price of English labor, whether in the field, the railway, the factory, the army, or the navy; whether at the sickle, the spade, the hod, or the desk. We believe, that for fifty years at the least, labor, taking its quality into account, has been cheaper in this country than in any part of Europe, and that this cheapness of labor has contributed vastly to the improvement and power of the country, to the success of all mercantile pursuits, and to the enjoyment of those who have money to spend. This same cheapness has placed the laboring classes most effectually under the hand of money and the heel of power.

This is, undoubtedly, the case; it is the inevitable result of the one hundred and fifty years of the protective policy, and it is the object sought to be obtained in this country by the protective interest. They alleged that protection is necessary against the "cheap labor of England," and that a period of protection will enable us to compete with that labor; that is to say, labor by the protective system will be made cheaper here. The worker will become the slave of capital, and then the manufacturing capital of England will have no advantage over that of this country. In England, capital triumphed over labor, and the profits of the country con

sisted in selling that cheap labor to all the world for the benefit of capital at home. Hence, all the world, the United States in particular, profited by that cheap labor, in common with the few capitalists in England. But that labor is now emigrating-it is about to set up for itself; and the capital of England must pay back its accumulation. Labor having escaped from the domination of capital in England, will not subject itself to similar extortion here.

It is not alone from the British Islands that the vast tide of emigration pours into the United States. Every country of Europe-almost of the world-has within the bosom of its people an irresistible attraction towards the great Republic. Of the thousand souls per day who arrive in New-York from other climes to settle in America, every country has its representatives, and every arrival swells the personal connection between citizens of the United States and citizens of every country of Europe. A universal commingling of races takes place, in which the English element is in very small proportion. At the commencement of the present century, the whites in the United States numbered but 40 per cent. of the population of Great Britain; they are now equal to it. In the last ten years the population of the British Islands increased but 500,000-the white population of the United States increased 5,880,631, or more than eleven times as much as England. The rate of decennial increase in Great Britain is less than 12 per cent.-while in the United States it is about 35 per cent. In the great Continental States the rate is considerably lower than in England. According to the progress of the last fifty years in France and in America, the United States will have the larger population in 1870-in 1900, they will exceed those of England, France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, and Switzerland combined. Prudent statesmen should bear these facts in mind.

Many persons now alive will see an American power of 100,000,000 souls, composed of the best blood and sinews of all the nations of Europe, tempered by and consolidated upon the American and Celtic race. The English character never predominated in the mass, and it is now rapidly disappearing altogether. The American race is no more English than the English is Danish or Norman. If we retain their language and literatnre, we need not be disgraced by their canting brutality of character, or the blood-stained annals of their treacherous diplomacy. In exchange for their literature, we give the oppressed of the race a home and a country, but they must come purged of the national crimes which are about being expiated in political overthrow and degradation in the scale of nations. It will be a curious retribution if the man who through chicane, bribery and treachery carried England's military power and influence to its zenith, should live to see her stripped of all consideration in European politics: and such an event seems not unlikely.