“We know,” said they, “that the people are poor; but we know also that, by subsisting merely upon the potato, and excluding better food and a higher state of comfort, of course the more is left for the landlord.”  This in general was their principle—­and its consequences are now upon themselves.

This, however, is a subject on which it is not our intention to expatiate here.  What we say is, that, in all the relations of civil life, Her people were shamefully and criminally neglected.  They were left without education, permitted to remain ignorant of the arts of life, and of that industrial knowledge on which, or rather on the application of which, all public prosperity is based.

And yet, although the people have great errors, without which no people so long neglected can ever be found, and, although they have been for centuries familiarized with suffering, yet it is absolute dread of poverty that drives them from their native soil; They understand, in fact, the progress of pauperism too well, and are willing to seek fortune in any clime, rather than abide its approach to themselves—­an approach which they know is in their case inevitable and certain.  For instance, the very class of our countrymen that constitutes the great bulk of our emigrants is to be found among those independent small farmers who appear to understand something like comfort.  One of these men holding, say sixteen or eighteen acres, has a family we will suppose of four sons and three daughters.  This family grows up, the eldest son marries, and the father, having no other way to provide for him, sets apart three or four acres of his farm, on which he and his wife settle.  The second comes also to marry, and hopes his father won’t treat him worse than he treated his brother.  He accordingly gets four acres more, and settles down as his brother did.  In this manner the holding is frittered away and subdivided among them.  For the first few years—­that is, before their children rise—­they may struggle tolerably well; but, at the expiration of twenty or twenty-five years, each brother finds himself with such a family as his little strip of land cannot adequately support, setting aside the claims of the landlord altogether; for rent in these cases is almost out of the question.

What, then, is the consequence?  Why, that here is to be found a population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen upon it—­a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution under which it groans.

Such is the history of one class of emigrants in this unhappy land, of ours; and what small farmer, with such a destiny as that we have detailed staring him and his in the face, would not strain every nerve that he might fly to any country—­rather than remain to encounter the frightful state of suffering which awaits him in this.