native home," through all his wanderings round this world of care," as his own beautiful poet expresses himself,-driven from place to place, and branded as a fugitive and a vagabond everywhere, till his pilgrimage in search of employment and of bread closes, perhaps, in another hemisphere, amidst strangers, who "give him a little earth for charity,"-I am persuaded few of those high-wrought cases of fictitious distress which occasionally awake our ready sympathies could approach the touching reality which the story would present.

The difference, therefore, between émigrations and these clearances is, that the latter exhibit a far more summary and unfeeling method of effectuating the same purpose. In the former case "the simple folk" are to be solicited, and in some sort bribed out of the country; means of escape are placed within their reach; allotments in a land flowing with milk and honey are proffered, (though, alas! many of those who have gone forth, have perished in the wilderness); but in these drivings, "clearances," or whatever they may be called, the exile is involuntary. Whatever be the nature of the crime in the eyes of those who hold that "they have no business to be where they are'," and who act upon that opinion, the punishment is, in fact, a severer form of that which is in most cases awarded as the sentence upon felony. Political economy has, on the one hand, inveighed against a large population, and, on the other, against small farms; and its converts have acted upon the palatable doctrine. The population have been expelled from their native fields like a drove of oxen, driven they knew not where, and withstood Malthus, Essay, p. 531.

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wherever they have attempted to take refuge. The fires have been quenched upon thousands of hearths, and the ploughshare now drives over the foundations of many a humble abode, which was once the refuge of peace and happiness. Some of the wretched survivors may, perhaps, linger amongst the ruins of their former habitations; but most of them have to seek refuge elsewhere, some in this country, some across the Atlantic; whither they were conveyed in vessels more crowded than slave-ships, in which many of them constantly expired, till even the humanity of strangers was excited, and the legislature of America interfered in their behalf, to protect them on their passage, and succour the survivors on their arrival'. These became the slaves and drudges of America, till premature death, in some form or other, and generally in its most appalling one, poverty and desolation, terminates their hapless story'. This may be deemed an overcharged statement; in many cases it is far otherwise. One principal branch of the subject, which I have elsewhere undertaken, has been to inquire into the extent of emigration to America, in order to answer the theory which is compelled, in defence of its fancied doublings, to pronounce it "immaterial,” and the examination has incidentally presented me with this melancholy picture of the fate of the less fortunate exiles of Erin, whom, for at least a century past, these clearances have expelled from her shores.

"There were 246 Irish paupers in the New York workhouse, April 1st, 1813."-(Dr. Dwight's Travels, vol. iii. p. 449.)

"The paupers in the United States are chiefly foreigners." (Warden, Statist. Acc. of the United States, vol. i. p. 51; ii. p. 88.) 2 Ibid. vol. iii. p. 192, &c. 3 Ibid. vol. i. pp. 259, 269, 272, &c.

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(3.) It would be well if those who are either the advocates of clearing farms in Ireland, or the actors in so cruel a scheme, would advert to the condition of that country. They should recollect that, owing to the rapacious conduct of too many of the landowners, the cruel system of subletting, and, above all, the base desertion of the country by those who derive their all from it, no labour worth speaking of, except what agriculture supplies, is demanded or encouraged in Ireland. To expel a number of these tenants at once is, therefore, to send them forth to certain destitution. Such would be the case in England, were England similarly circumstanced; so it was, indeed, when she was so in times past. Lord Bacon strongly inveighed against " engrossing large pasturages ;" but, notwithstanding humanity, policy, and even the legislature then discouraged the evil, we find it was still prevalent, and its consequences were, what they now are, deplorable in the extreme. Hear Sir Thomas More on this intensely touching case: "Therefore is it," says he, "that one covetous and unsatiable cormorant, and very plague of his native country, may compass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground within one pale or hedge; the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else either by covin and fraud, or violent oppression, they be put besides it; or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all. By one ineans, therefore, or by other, either by hook or by crook, they must needs depart away,-poor, silly, wretched souls! men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and the whole

household, small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in; all their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale; yet being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to sell it as a thing of nought. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then do but to steal, and then justly, pardy, be hanged, or else go about a begging? And yet then also they be cast into prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set at work, though they never so willingly prefer themselves thereto1."

So far the authority of More on the effects of "clearing" in England in his time, which was before other and sufficient sources of employment were developed. To suppose that this intrepid patriot was either ignorant of the cause of the distress that pervaded the kingdom at that period, or that he exaggerated its extent, would argue but little in favour of our own knowledge of the history of the country. Of these poor fugitives, who, as he tells us, were necessitated to become purloiners, we learn that "72,000 great and petty thieves were put to death in the reign of Henry VIII"." In Elizabeth's time, we are informed "rogues were trussed up apace, and that there was not a year commonly, wherein three or four hundred of them were not devoured and eaten up by the gallows in one place or another." Strype, speaking of

More, Utopia, vol. i. pp. 59, 60, 61.

'Hollingshed, Description of England, vol. i. p. 186.

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one county only, Somersetshire, says, " forty persons had been there executed, in a year, for robberies, thefts, and other felonies; thirty-five burnt in the hand; thirtyseven whipped; 183 discharged; and that those that were discharged were wicked and desperate persons. Notwithstanding this great number of indictments, the fifth part of the felonies committed in the county were not brought to trial,-owing to the remissness of the magistrates, or the foolish lenity of the people. The rapines committed by the infinite number of the wicked, wandering, idle people were intolerable to the poor countrymen, and obliged them to a perpetual watch of their sheepfolds, pastures, woods, and corn fields. The other counties in England were in no better condition than Somersetshire, and many of them were even in a worse: there were at least three or four hundred able-bodied vagabonds in every county, who lived by theft and rapine; and who sometimes met in troops to the number of sixty, and committed spoil on the inhabitants: if all the felons of this kind were reduced to subjection, they would form a strong army: the magistrates were awed, by the association and threats of the confederates, from executing justice on the offenders." Sir F. M. Eden quotes this passage in his history of the poor, as exhibiting the state of the kingdom at large, and plainly attributes it to want of employment for "the superfluous hands which were not required in agriculture," owing to the " engrossments" Lord Bacon alludes to. I would simply direct the consideration of our anti-populationists, especially

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1 Strype, Annals, vol. iv. p. 290.

Eden, Hist. of the Poor, vol. i. pp. 110, 111.