from you.  Is not the ex-officio clause in the Poor-law Bill your bantling, or that of your leader, Lord Stanley?  Is not the quarter of an acre clause test for relief your creation?  Were not the most conspicuous names on your committee the abettors of an amendment as iniquitous as it was selfish—­viz., to remove the poor-rates from their own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry?  Are not they the same members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in this Catholic emigration plan?  What good could we expect from such a Nazareth?"[289]

The Prime Minister did not take up the great colonization scheme.  He said, in the House of Commons, on the 29th of April, that he declined, on the part of the Government, assuming the responsibility of providing for the absorption of the great excess of labour then existing in Ireland.  “I deny,” said Lord John, “on the part of the Government, the responsibility of completely, still less suddenly, resolving that question.  What we can do, and what we, the Government, have endeavoured to do is, to mitigate present suffering.”

The Government was of opinion that emigration, left to itself, would transfer the starving people to the United States and British America, as quickly as they could be provided for in those countries.  This calculation turned out to be correct enough, as the following figures will show:—­Emigration from Ireland in the year 1845 is set down at 74,969; it increased in 1846 to 105,955, although the Famine had not to the full extent turned the minds of the people to seek homes in the New World.  The emigration of 1847 more than doubled that of 1846, being 215,444; ti fell in 1848 to 178,159, but in 1849 the emigration of 1847 was repeated, the emigrants of that year being 214,425, of which 2,219 were orphan girls from the Workhouses.  The magnitude of the exodus was maintained in 1850, that year giving 209,054 voluntary exiles; but the emigration in 1851, which year closed the decade, quite outstripped that of any previous year, the figure in that year standing at 257,372.[290]

The census of 1841 shows the population of Ireland to have been in that year 8,175,124.  Taking the usual ratio of births over deaths, it should have increased in 1851 to 9,018,799, instead of which it fell to 6,552,385; thus, being nearly two millions and a-half less than it should have been.  These two millions and a-half disappeared in the Famine.  They disappeared by death and emigration.  The emigration during the ten years from 1842 to 1851, both inclusive, was 1,436,862.  Subtracting this from the amount of decrease in the population, namely, 2,476,414, the remainder will be 1,039,552; which number of persons must have died of starvation and its concomitant epidemics; but even this number, great as it is, must be supplemented by the deaths which occurred among Famine emigrants, in excess of the percentage of deaths among ordinary emigrants.