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There is another peculiarity which is invariably characteristic of a declining state, and the certain precursor of its ruin, that the decrease which takes place in its population is mainly owing to emigration, not to pestilence, famine, or violent deaths. It is the sinking of men's minds, from the appalling sight of ruin around them in every direction, not the prostration of their bodies by war or disease, which is the real cause of the decline of a state. As long as people's spirits are kept up, by the demand for labour being considerable, wages being fair and industry remunerative, the utmost disasters arising from plague, pestilence, and famine are speedily repaired, and they make no durable impression or chasm in the population. But when, in addition to these external calamities, the lasting evils of declining employment, unremunerated industry, and a rapidly increasing pauper-class, are felt, despair, after a time, seizes the mind of nearly the whole middle and working classes. Every one makes haste to leave the country in which hope is closed, where despair is painted in every countenance. Sauve qui peut becomes the universal principle: it is like the rushing of passengers in a ship-wrecked vessel to get into the life-boat. The indigent, if they can only get away, hasten in multitudes to the sea-coast to avoid the starvation which awaits them at home. The dangers of an emigrant vessel, as the Times well remarks, "are forgotten in the greater horrors of a work-house." Emigration then becomes the great running sore which weakens, and at length destroys, the state; for not only does it draw off numbers doubly greater than all that can be destroyed by plague, pestilence, and famine, but it entirely weakens and paralyses the principle of population at home; it not only removes a large portion of the people, but it cuts off the sources from which they are to be renewed ;-it sweeps away future generations with the present. The persons who go away are, for the most part, men and women in the prime of life; and whence is the rising generation to come from if they are removed? Yet so universal is the despair which, in a state that is visibly sinking, seizes the whole, especially of

the rural population, and such the desire to escape the crushing weight of the direct taxes with which such a state of society is invariably attended, that it is recorded by the historian of the Decline and Fall, that the Roman empire was more depopulated, in its later stages, by the migration of the inhabitants of its frontier provinces, than by all the arms of the barbarians, and that, in several incursions, the Scythian horse regained their native wilds with 120,000 willing captives at their horses' heels.

In such a state of society, emigration which, under more favourable circumstances, might have proved a relief, is found to be the greatest possible aggravation of the public distresses. The reason is, that the only persons who can get away are those who have some capital, and thus possess the means of transport. The paupers and destitute are all forced to remain at home, deprived by their poverty of the flebile remedium, so largely had recourse to by their more fortunate brethren in misfortune, that of leaving their homes, their country, the bones of their fathers. They dare not hope even for the lot of the poor exile of Erin. As it is only the solvent and comparatively affluent who can thus make their escape, and the paupers are all left, not only does the burden of their maintenance daily become more oppressive upon those who remain, but their means of meeting the burden are diminished in the same proportion. The productive industry of the country declines in the same proportion as its direct taxes increase. The people who would maintain that productive industry, are not only gone, but they have carried with them the seeds of industry yet to come. The condition of those left at home thus daily becomes worse; and as the public burdens in such a state of society, as a matter of course, so far from diminishing, rapidly increase, from the multitude of poor who must be relieved, the condition of the industrious classes at length becomes such that the state is stript of all its useful citizens, and falls an easy prey to the first serious invader. No reader of the immortal Decline and Fall, or of the more detailed works of Sismondi,

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since 1845, and from that period there has been a decline in the entire population of the Empire. Everybody knows that down to that period the Empire, especially from 1812 to 1845, was not only prosperous, but eminently so. It was the period of fine harvests, trifling importation of food, railway mania, high wages, extensive paper issues, and unbounded prosperity. We all recollect how loudly Sir R. Peel sounded the note of triumph on this state of things, in his parliamentary speeches in 1845 and 1846, and with what complacency he referred to them, as proving that his Tariff of 1842 had been founded on right principles. Assuming, then, that

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Here is a result sufficient to make us hold our breath, and awaken the most serious reflections in the breast of every person capable of reflection in the country. The population of the Empire has not only ceased to increase since 1846, but it has receded since that time no less than 810,000, being at the average rate of 200,000 a-year!!! This in a country which had previously so steadily and rapidly increased in numbers, which, between 1821 and 1831, had increased 3,127,000, being at the rate of above 300,000 a-year; and from 1831 to 1841, no less than 2,420,000, being at the rate of 240,000 a-year!

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809,990

If we inquire into the particulars of which this change is composed, it appears still more frightful. It has occurred, for the most part, in one part of the Empire, the depopulation of which stands forth in hideous relief beside the increase exhibited in some of the great cities. The total decrease of inhabitants in Ireland has been, since 1841, 1,659,340 souls. But as the population unquestionably went on increasing at the rate of the preceding decade down to 1846, the numbers at the commencement of that year must have stood thus:

8,175,124 203,862

8,378,986

6,515,784

1,863,102

country which, from 1821 to 1831, had increased from 6,801,827 to

* Table showing the emigration from the British islands in the years

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The Census and Free Trade. 1851.] 7,767,401, being an INCREASE of 965,574, — at the rate of nearly 100,000 a-year!

The same result appears in all the other parts of the Empire, though not, of course, in such striking colours as in Ireland; which, being entirely agricultural, has, of course, suffered most

from the great change of measures
which took place in 1846. Generally
speaking, the great towns have in-
creased; and in the purely agricul-
tural districts, population has de-
clined. The increase in a few of the
greatest towns of the Empire has been
as follows:-

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arrived in four months, only preceding
April 10, 1848, to the number of
42,680; for a year after, at the rate of
1000 a-week.

On the other hand, population in the greater part of the purely agricultural or pastoral districts has declined. The total increase of Scotland, it has been seen, in the last ten years, was 250,600, of which no less than 98,015 has been in the single county of Lanark, including 63,171 in the city of Glasgow. The inhabitants of that city need not be told of what description of persons this increase has consisted. The enormous and crushing weight of the poor-rates serves as a perpetual memento, that it is chiefly thus:composed of destitute Irish, who

The same contrast between the movement of the population in the cities and the country, which forms the leading features of the late census, appears in the most striking manner in the neighbouring island. ALL THE TOWNS IN IRELAND HAVE INCREASED THE COUNTIES HAVE The chief towns have stood

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CLINED.

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* Dr Strang's Abstract of Glasgow Census, a most admirable and elaborate work.

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What a picture does this table exhibit! Cork sunk 222,000; Galway 124,000; Mayo 114,000; Tipperary 111,000; Limerick 80,000; Roscommon 79,000—all in five years; for up to 1846, as already shown, all these counties had increased in numbers! The history of modern Europe does not present a similar instance, in so short a time, of awful and wellauthenticated decline of the human species.

But this is not all. The census of Great Britain for 1851, although it does not exhibit the same appalling picture of the decrease of the human species as Ireland affords, yet contains unequivocal proof that we have attained the limits of our prosperity, and that, with the great change in our policy in 1846, the weakness of age has already set in upon the yet youth

ful state. Nay, this appears even in the great manufacturing towns, and among the trading and commercial class, for whose benefit the great change, fraught with such awful calamities in other quarters, was exclusively intended. Take, as an example, Glasgow, one of the greatest manufacturing and commercial cities of the Empire, and where Free-Tradeprinciples were most prevalent, and were expected to produce the most beneficial results. It appears from Dr Strang's tables, compiled with equal care and judgment from the census returns, which that gentleman conducted, that the movement of the population for the last fifty years has stood thus within the bills of mortality of that city, which take in about 10,000 more than the Parliamentary limits:

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