for the resource of postal circulars and the house-to-house collection of proxies, it is notorious that these concerns would every now and then be shattered by the unreasonable or sinister small minorities alone willing to attend.

Where a personal interest or public sentiment much stronger than that of a shareholder in a company is required to induce average electors to go to the poll, is it not formidably likely that such adequate private interest will be sinister; or that such adequate public sentiment will be the fruit, not of a quiet and reasonable political opinion, but either of intense yet narrow sectarian enthusiasm, or of violent yet petty local partisanship?

February, 1881.

F.

TRANSPLANTING TO THE COLONIES.

In the competitive examination of remedies for Irish ill-content, each claiming the first place and confidently undertaking to answer the most trying questions, we cannot fail to discriminate between those that are well grounded in subjects of general applicability, and that are good for all, and the special topics, more difficult, but, if possible, more indispensable, for the cure of local and exceptional need. In a recent letter to the Times, Lord Meath points out succinctly, but suggestively, the duty of keeping the distinction in mind; and while dealing with the well-to-do portions of the country only as they may require, grappling boldly, by measures administrative rather than statutory, with the overcrowding of half-famished sea-coast counties of the west.

Over-population never was less true as a general description of Ireland, and never more true of particular districts than at the present hour. What aggravates the mischief and misery is the obvious and unchangeable fact that the paralysing and pitiable congestion exists where the soil and climate are comparatively unfavourable for small husbandry, or the maintenance in comfort of a peasantry dependent on its produce alone. The venerable earl, who has had ample experience as resident proprietor, popular representative, lieutenant of his county, and contributor to all useful works in the Irish metropolis, wisely endorses the recommendation already urged by the best and ablest men of every degree, that Government should initiate a liberal and comprehensive scheme for finding farms and homesteads in our colonies for those who are not, and cannot be, accommodated as they ought to be in Donegal, Mayo, Kerry, and Clare.

Whatever be the tenor of the forthcoming Land Bill, this I am sure is a sine quâ non of future prosperity and peace. From personal observation I know the condition of most of these districts well; and I am convinced, not as of yesterday, that a more mistaken policy cannot be conceived than that which would tether the willing but wageless conacre man to a miserable patch of half-reclaimed bog or mountain, the rent of which he can only earn by harvest-work elsewhere, and the produce of which, even in a dry summer, cannot yield more than the barest and lowest subsistence for his family. Legislative changes more or less beneficial in Wexford

or Antrim, Tipperary or Tyrone, can have no adequate effect on him, If you gave him his (miscalled) holding for nothing, it would not materially mend his plight to-morrow; and after to-morrow that plight would be as hopeless and insecure as now. Primary schools, model farms, creeping railways, cheap postage, teetotal lectures, newspapers without stint, tracts on cleanliness, and the multiplication of branch banks, all can avail nought to put firm ground under his feet. To use his own familiar phrase, his father was the like before him, and he never had a chance of doing better.' He knows that some of his kin are doing well in America; and in a wet season he wishes he was there too. With sunshine and new seed he laughs again; but if the 'crop should forget to come up,' he curses the rent which the overbidding of men like himself has made high, or the gombein he cannot pay. Again he wishes himself over the sea, where good land is plenty and wages are to be earned every day in the week. But the season is late, and he has not the means to go, and he lingers on moodily, wondering what may turn up, and ready to swell with his despair the voice of political discontent. The indisposition to labour often ascribed to him is refuted wherever abroad he gets the opportunity to work; but, where regular wages are not to be had from a want of middle classes of various degrees, the languor of disappointment and despondency grows habitual; and until the poor cottier tenant of the west is transplanted to happier soil, where his old griefs and habits may be alike forgotten, he can never be rescued from his destitution and discontent.

In a recent circular Mr. Vere Foster publishes a statement of applications for aid to single individuals to emigrate to Canada and the United States during the past year. Of these 335 were from Roman Catholic and 77 from Protestant clergymen, dispersed throughout the various dioceses from Raphoe to Cloyne. The cost of transit, about 91. per head, was generally made up by contributions of three-fourths advanced by friends and relatives on promise of repayment, when possible, and one-fourth contributed by charitably disposed persons from a fund long established for the purpose. The parish priest, when vouching for the respectability of the applicant, seldom failed to speak of the necessity with regret; but he did not on that account refrain from backing the urgency of the claim. And if this be so when the intending emigrants are young and single women, how much more cheerfully might he not be disposed to recommend assistance for youths of the other sex, or in cases where whole families might be transplanted together! The want of sufficient means is the only obstacle in the way, for every consideration, moral, social, and political, tells in the balance in favour of household or village. emigration, in preference to desultory efforts to aid the most healthy and adventurous members of the family. Ample experience proves that those who are thus assisted to go forth and seek their fortune

are not ungrateful or unmindful of the help afforded them in their hour of need; and every year since the humane method of assistance was first organised in 1848, large sums have been remitted in instalments to relations and neighbours left behind.

There is no reason why the same melody of affection, thrilling and true in every note, should not be arranged with accompaniments and chords; there is no reason why greater volume and power should not come of the harmony of concerted parts than of the single voice. Time out of mind the family has been the natural unit of emigration. If the roots must be loosened in the native soil, we believe without argument that they are likelier to take hold of foreign earth when removed in the bulb, and not exposed to chill and damage, one by one.

To the least imaginative or foreseeing of humankind the fear of loneliness casts a certain gloom over anticipations afar off. Gay one-andtwenty, without qualm for riven ties of friendship or companionship, readily dashes away the parting tear, and enters freely into careless chat with the first fellow-passenger on board that looks disposed to make the best of it. But the nature of the Celt, though venturous at short notice, is not for the most part deliberately enterprising. Courage is one thing; the confidence which the clear calculation of distant results can alone impart is another. The Galway peasant at fault for a living at home may screw up his nerves to go, and neither wince nor waver when it comes to the point. On a cold dark morning he bustles through leave-taking and is even glad to be off; but all the same he has yearnings and misgivings for weeks or months beforehand of being stranded by some unlucky chance beyond the reach of help or pity; and his fancy conjures up whole tissues of possible or impossible, improbable or incompatible bad luck, that may be awaiting him beyond the sea. And what he painfully stifles, mother and sister and old folk by the hearth dream aloud; or they read in the once cheerful fire a sad fate of the buoghil, the cabin's pride, or the darkeyed colleen that never slept from under its low but loving roof. Could they all go together in the same ship it would be nothing, and if two or three of their neighbours as well, it would be more of a new hiving than a clearing out. This would not be eviction, but joint and several emergence from the slough of despond on to firm ground of safety and hope. The risks and chances inavertible from all great changes in human life would remain; but they would no more haunt the silence of the night or the weary hours of the day. Content would supersede repining, and mutual encouragement take the place of reciprocal reproach; crossing the ocean would be migration rather than emigration-change of home rather than forsaking it. Looking at the matter from mere expediency's point of view, would it not be worth a rich and much troubled kingdom's while to invest a good round sum in such an experiment? Apart from all

right and wrong, high sense of duty and bitter after-taste of neglect, -would it not pay? But without simultaneous action the experiment cannot be made with any hope of appreciable effect. Even to retrieve and reform a single county where the anarchy of ruin now prevails, whole villages and hamlets must have the opportunity brought home to them-not by persuasion or driving-but simply by letting the alternative be plainly and honestly placed within their reach; and with patient faith in its efficacy, if not next week or next month, that eventually its intrinsic worth would be realised. Let a third-class emigrant ship under Government orders, and with Government responsibility for care in transit of each passenger, be advertised to sail on the first of each month from each western port for Canada or Australia; and empty or full let its foresail be spread to the wind; and before three months a bustling concourse of competitors for places in the floating cabin would be found at each point of departure, the only rule among which would be, first come first served. This is the true and the safe way to cleanse the full bosom of the perilous stuff that weighs upon the country's heart.

Third-class trains across the ocean; empty, half empty, or full, let them go. Like penny posts they might not everywhere pay at first: but they would all pay in the end. Laissez faire is the easiest and the cheapest rule of the markets for shirtings, bacon, pig-iron, brown middlings, and the discount on three months' bills; but laissez faire in cases of brain fever, half-famine--social convulsion-and moral dynamite in the ground story of one whole wing of empire, is the logic of idiocy. If you are up to your work the less time you waste in pottering and palavering about things finding their own level the better. Mere admonition, conciliatory, plausible, eloquent, is all to no purpose or something worse. 'There is no speculation in those eyes,' they are glazed and blinded by the perplexity of things, and there can no good come of waiting and gazing. It is time to be up and doing while happily there is still external peace, and freedom from foreign interruption or distraction. It is the time for gathering our colonial children together and drawing them closer by the bonds of mutual interest as well as affinity, and offering them ungrudged participation in all the honours and privileges of ancestral power and long-established strength; that when the evil day of foreign envy, jealousy, and revenge comes, as sooner or later it will, we may feel assurance that the seed of our loins will not be wanting for our help and stay. And to this end it is above all things desirable, nay, indispensable, that we multiply the unpurchasable bonds of mutual affection and benefit, with our three great groups of colonies. The Canadian Dominion craves more people to occupy and own its boundless wheat fields in the West. The younger Australias are ready to receive shiploads of healthful and capable settlers (and we ought to think of sending them no others); and all doubt and danger being now at an