CAUSES OF DISTRESS REMEDIAL AGENCIES. 555 



to Canada by Emigrants, if the thousands that are spent by different 

 land-companies, if all these thousands were devoted to their le- 

 gitimate uses, we should hear no more of incurable distress. And 

 has this enormous waste of wealth and labour eased by one tittle the 

 pressure upon the labouring community? Not one: for so universal 

 is this pressure of such wide operation are the causes leading to it, 

 that every hiatus, every gap made by these removals, is at once 

 filled up. It is the very acme of absurdity, to think of curing an 

 universal disease in the body politic, by such local and partial 

 remedies or rather by no remedies whatever ; for Emigration em- 

 ployed for such a purpose is merely lopping away the system inch by 

 inch, without any sanative result. An eloquent writer, in speaking 

 on the condition of the poor, has forcibly and truly said : " Well 

 may the cheek of the patriot glow when he stands upon the quays of 

 Liverpool or Glasgow, and sees thousands and thousands of his 

 countrymen proceeding into voluntary exile, in order to escape from 

 the pressure of home misery! Well may his heart burn within him, 

 when he recognises in these pilgrim bands the very essence and sinews 

 of a nation's strength, the provident and thrifty labourer and his 

 family, who is carrying his industry and his hard-won earnings to 

 some land where Poor Laws and Corn Laws, where taxes upon 

 every article of production and consumption, have no existence, and 

 where he hopes to find a field for his labour as this is all that he 

 wants, and this merry England denies to him ! " 



Workhouses, Home Colonization, and Emigration do not form, 

 therefore, portions of the remedial agencies we would bring to bear 

 upon the depressed labourer, except in so far as workhouses or 

 poor-houses are made the recipients for the aged, the impotent, and 

 the vicious. We would, in no respect, alter the status of the la- 

 bourer : he is, in his natural position, a man exchanging his labour for 

 the means of subsistence ; firstly, as a hired servant ; and secondly, 

 by private industry ; aiding, assisting, and partially made independent 

 of mere hiring. This is the position he ought to hold, and, if re- 

 moved from it, he is decidedly injured. As he now stands, he has 

 lost, in a great measure, all self-support ; partly, by the prevalence of 

 large farms a system which has been carried so far, that in eight of 

 the agricultural counties, during the last century, a diminution of not 

 less than 20,000 cottages took place partly, by continued depression 



