We have already referred several times in passing to the Irish who have immigrated into England; and we shall now have to investigate more closely the causes and results of this immigration.  The rapid extension of English industry could not have taken place if England had not possessed in the numerous and impoverished population of Ireland a reserve at command.  The Irish had nothing to lose at home, and much to gain in England; and from the time when it became known in Ireland that the east side of St. George’s Channel offered steady work and good pay for strong arms, every year has brought armies of the Irish hither.  It has been calculated that more than a million have already immigrated, and not far from fifty thousand still come every year, nearly all of whom enter the industrial districts, especially the great cities, and there form the lowest class of the population.  Thus there are in London, 120,000; in Manchester, 40,000; in Liverpool, 34,000; Bristol, 24,000; Glasgow, 40,000; Edinburgh, 29,000, poor Irish people. {90a} These people having grown up almost without civilisation, accustomed from youth to every sort of privation, rough, intemperate, and improvident, bring all their brutal habits with them among a class of the English population which has, in truth, little inducement to cultivate education and morality.  Let us hear Thomas Carlyle upon this subject:  {90b}

“The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity, restlessness, unreason, misery, and mockery, salute you on all highways and byways.  The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg.  He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with.  In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back—­for wages that will purchase him potatoes.  He needs only salt for condiment, he lodges to his mind in any pig-hutch or dog-hutch, roosts in outhouses, and wears a suit of tatters, the getting on and off of which is said to be a difficult operation, transacted only in festivals and the high tides of the calendar.  The Saxon-man, if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work.  The uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite of strength, drives the Saxon native out, takes possession in his room.  There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder.  Whoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming, but sunk.  That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish, competing with them in all the markets:  that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price;