The causes of emigration, as one should think, are patent to all.  Landlords do not deny that they are anxious to see the people leave the country.  They give them every assistance to do so.  Their object is to get more land into their own hands, but the policy will eventually prove suicidal.  A revolutionary spirit is spreading fast through Europe.  Already the standing subject of public addresses to the people in England, is the injustice of certain individuals being allowed to hold such immense tracts of country in their possession.  We all know what came of the selfish policy of the landowners in France before the Revolution, which consigned them by hundreds to the guillotine.  A little self-sacrifice, which, in the end, would have been for their own benefit, might have saved all this.  The attempt to depopulate Ireland has been tried over and over again, and has failed signally.  It is not more likely to succeed in the nineteenth century than at any preceding period.  Even were it possible that wholesale emigration could benefit any country, it is quite clear that Irish emigration cannot benefit England.  It is a plan to get rid of a temporary difficulty at a terrific future cost.  Emigration has ceased to be confined to paupers.  Respectable farmers are emigrating, and taking with them to America bitter memories of the cruel injustice which has compelled them to leave their native land.

Second, How misery leads to emigration.  The poor are leaving the country, because they have no employment.  The more respectable classes are leaving the country, because they prefer living in a free land, where they can feel sure that their hard earnings will be their own, and not their landlord’s, and where they are not subject to the miserable political and religious tyranny which reigns supreme in Ireland.  In the evidence given before the Land Tenure Committee of 1864, we find the following statements made by Dr. Keane, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Cloyne.  His Lordship is a man of more than ordinary intelligence, and of more than ordinary patriotism.  He has made the subject of emigration his special study, partly from a deep devotion to all that concerns the welfare of his country, and partly from the circumstance of his residence being at Queenstown, the port from which Irishmen leave their native shores, and the place where wails of the emigrants continually resound.  I subjoin a few of his replies to the questions proposed:—­

     “I attribute emigration principally to the want of employment.”

“A man who has only ten or twelve acres, and who is a tenant-at-will, finding that the land requires improvement, is afraid to waste it [his money], and he goes away.  I see many of these poor people in Queenstown every day.”

     “I have made inquiries over and over again in Queenstown and
     elsewhere, and I never yet heard that a single farmer emigrated and
     left the country who had a lease.”