to the improvement of the British North American colonies, or whether it shall be suffered and encouraged to take that which will be, and is, its inevitable course, to deluge Great Britain with poverty and wretchedness, and gradually, but certainly, to equalize the state of the English and Irish peasantry.  Two different rates of wages, and two different conditions of the labouring classes, cannot permanently co-exist.  One of two results appears to be inevitable; the Irish population must be raised towards the standard of the English, or the English depressed towards that of the Irish.  The question, whether an extensive plan of emigration shall or shall not be adopted, appears to your Committee to resolve itself into the simple point, whether the wheat-fed population of Great Britain shall or shall not be supplanted by the potato-fed population of Ireland?"[278]

The same reasons are given by the same Committee in 1827, and they are again repeated in 1830, by another Committee, whose duty it was to inquire into the state of the Irish poor.

The famous Devon Land Commission, which was called into existence in 1842, presented its voluminous report to Parliament in 1845, which was founded on the examination of eleven hundred witnesses, whose evidence was taken on the spot in every county in Ireland; the Commissioners having visited more than ninety towns for the purpose;—­that Commission recommended emigration from Ireland, but in a cautious and modified way.  The Commissioners say:—­“After considering the recommendations, thus repeatedly made by Committees of Parliament upon this subject, and the evidence of Mr. Godley, in which the different views of the subject are well given, we desire to express our own conviction, that a well-organized system of emigration may be of very great service, as one among the measures which the situation of the occupiers of land in Ireland, at present calls for.  We cannot think that either emigration, or the extension of Public Works, or the reclamation or improvement of land can, singly, remove the existing evil.  All these remedies must be provided concurrently, according to the circumstances of each case.  In this view, and to this extent only, we wish to direct attention to the subject of emigration."[279]

A Select Committee of the House of Lords, on the operation of the Poor Law in Ireland, spoke approvingly of emigration as a relief to the labour market at home, and it therefore recommended, “that increased facilities for the emigration of poor persons should be afforded, with the cooperation of the Government."[280]

One Parliamentary Committee, at least, condemned emigration in terms both decided and remarkable; it was the Committee of Public Works appointed in 1835.  In its second report this passage occurs:—­“It may be doubted, whether the country does contain a sufficient quantity of labour to develope its resources; and while the empire is loaded with taxation to defray the charges of its wars, it appears most politic to use its internal resources for improving the condition of its population, by which the revenue of the exchequer must be increased, rather than encourage emigration, by which the revenue would suffer diminution, or than leave the labouring classes in their present state, by which poverty, crime, and the charges of Government must be inevitably extended."[281]