either be that he is so little attached to the institutions of his own country, that he is willing to submit to those of another; or that he despises the latter sufficiently to look forward to replacing them by those of his own."[585] No unprejudiced person can for a moment doubt which of these causes has been most active in producing Irish emigration.  The Irishman’s love of home and of his native land, is a fact beyond all dispute:  his emigration, then, can have no other cause than this, that his country, or the country which governs his native land, does not care for him; and when we find noble lords and honorable members suggesting “the more emigration the better,” we cannot doubt that he is the victim to indifference, if not to absolute dislike.  Undoubtedly, if the Irishman did not care for his country, and if the Englishman, when planted in Ireland, did not become equally discontented and rather more indignant than his predecessors under English rule in Ireland, the arrangement might be a very admirable one; but Irishmen, to the third and fourth generation, do not forget their country, neither do they forget why they have been compelled to leave it.  A work has been published lately on the subject of the Irish in America.  It is much to be regretted, that the very able writer did not give statistics and facts, as well as inferences and anecdotes.  A history of the Irish in America, should include statistics which could not be disputed, and facts which could not be denied.  The facts in the work alluded to are abundant, and most important; but they should have been prefaced by an account of the causes which have led to emigration, and as accurate statistics as possible of its results.

Some few English writers have had the honesty to admit that their colonial policy has not been the most admirable; “nor should we forget,” says the author of the History of the United States, “that the spirit in which these colonies were ruled from England was one, in the main, of intense selfishness.  The answer of Seymour, an English Attorney-General under William and Mary, or towards the close of the seventeenth century, to the request of Virginia, for a college, when her delegate begged him to consider that the people of Virginia had souls to be saved as well as the people of England:  Souls! damn your souls! plant tobacco!” is scarcely an unfair exponent of that spirit.[586] Another writer says:  “Historians, in treating of the American rebellion, have confined their arguments too exclusively to the question of internal taxation, and the right or policy of exercising this prerogative.  The true source of the rebellion lay deeper—­in our traditional colonial policy."[587] One more quotation must suffice:  “The legal rights of those colonies have been perpetually violated.  Those which were strong enough were driven to separation; those which adhered to us in that great contest, or which we have subsequently acquired or founded, are either denied constitutions,