It is now little more than a year since we called public attention to the emigration of the lower order of Protestants from Ireland. It was then that season of the year, the spring-time of all nature, in which it is usual for unencumbered vessels, with their stately masts, to crowd our seaports, as densely as trees of the forest, and then to move from our shores, bearing on the bosom of the wave the fearless hearts and the stalwart arms of the wandering children of emigration. We then detailed the alarming extent to which the emigration of Protestants had arrived; we set forth the sad causes that led to so disastrous a result, and we endeavoured to point out, in the language of warning, the darkness and the ruin with which such emigration was pregnant to all that we prize and love in our common country.

We now resume-with new and deeply embittered feelings-the melancholy subject, and we do so from no love to dwell on so sad and painful a picture, for we know of nothing in the state of this distracted and factiontorn island, so featured with utter hopelessness, and so seemingly melancholy in all its results-so totally removed from the possibility of remedy -so prophetic of a lingering, yet certain death, to all that we most long for in her political and religious state, that it only saddens and depresses our own spirits; but it is our duty-a painful and distressing one-but yet a duty--as speaking forth the interests and breath

VOL. IV.

ing the sentiments of Irish Protestantism, to invite public attention again to the subject, for we confess that if we ourselves were ever so much disposed to bury it in oblivion, it would be forced upon our minds by the thousands who, during the last two months, have been flocking to our seaports, in order to emigrate to the American world.

During the last twenty years, there has been a steady and still increasing stream of emigration among the lower order of Protestants-every successive year displays a considerable increase in the number of emigrants over those of the preceding year, so that for the last eight or nine years, indeed ever since the year 1825, and more especially since the year 1829, the number has been swelling to such an extent, that it is utterly impossible for our Protestant population to supply so exhausting a drain much longer. No one who is not acquainted with the number of our Protestants in our various country districts, can have any adequate conception of the multitudes that are leaving us, which has already made a visible and most sensible impression on the numerical amount of that population. Some parishes have lost ten, some fifty, some an hundred, some five hundred, and we can name some_parishes that have lost their whole Protestant population, while in others it has been so reduced in numbers as to be but the shrivelled and meagre skele ton of what it once had been. All this has taken place chiefly during the last

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ten years, owing to the spirit for emigration that has seized and agitated the minds of the Protestants of this country as the mind of one man. It is a sad and disheartening sight to witness whole parishes and districts pouring out their life-blood, and drained so as to become a moral waste; even some of our counties, in which there were large districts and whole townlands thickly peopled with Protestant farmers, have been literally exhausted by the stream, the continually increasing stream that has been flowing from them these last five years; some estates, where they once flourished, have been deprived of every Protestant soul, and many are the instances where the clergyman has to mourn over the wreck of a once-extensive congregation, now reduced, by emigration, to the merest shadow of its former self. We cannot ascertain the total number of Protestant souls that have left us since this desire for emigration commenced; but it is certain that from the year 1825, to the present season of 1834 inclusive, the total amount has been ascertained with tolerable accuracy at one hundred and seventy-five thousand !-175,000 PROTESTANTS!-Above one-half this immense multitude has left us within the last three years, a circumstance which forms one of the most melancholy features of this emigration, as shewing that wasting and exhausting as it had previously been, it has now become an evil of awful and tremendous magnitude, threatening to leave this island in a few years more without any Protestant population whatever. It is an interesting but distressing fact that the various colonies or settlements of that peculiar class of Protestants, called Palatines, so well known in some of the southern and western counties, have latterly been broken up by the gradual emigration of those people, so that at this moment there is scarcely a relic of those once-thriving and orderly settlements in the country. The subtraction of so great a body of persons from the Protestant population as that which has already taken place very far from being the worst feature in our prospects. Those who remain behind seem all preparing, or at least desiring, to depart; the whole Protestant population, from north to south,

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and from east to west, seem full of the thoughts of abandoning this island to its fate, and removing with all they value to the American world. The whole body are in motion, agitated like the leaves of the forest in the wind, and give promise of an emigration, unexampled in the history of the civilized world-a whole people, two millions of souls, loosened from their native soil, bursting every link that bound them to home and to country, and transplanting themselves and their little ones to far distant lands, there to seek that independence-securityhappiness, which never could be theirs amid the distractions of their native land!

If we have found it a painful task to point public attention to the immense extent of emigration among the Protestants of the lower orders, we shall find it still more so, to point to the sad effects which it has already produced and is still producing in the country. We do not allude to that feeling of distrust and sense of insecurity, which the removal of such numbers creates among those who are necessitated to remain; but to evils which are admitted to be of no common magnitude among politicians of every party, evils, which portend results that we cannot dwell on without shuddering.

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In the first place, the effect of the emigration of so great a number of farmers and small capitalists upon the amount of farming capital in the country, has already been materially felt. is a fact with which every one is acquainted, that the emigrants are almost universally the most monied portion of the population; they all have some capital, more or less, which has been employed here in farming purposes, either in agriculture or in rearing stock; this capital is at once removed, and it has been so much felt by the country that it was given in evidence before the committee of the House of Commons, which sat last year on the state of agriculture in Ireland, that the farming capital was already very seriously diminished by it, so much so as even to have led to a diminution in the stock of cattle reared in the country, as well as to a material lessening of the means and comforts of the farming and labouring classes-nor could it well be otherwise, for if we calculate that each individual emigrant of that

mass of Protestants, who have left us during the last ten years, removed with him an average of ten pounds in money and effects, which certainly is a moderate allowance, the total will amount to nearly two millions of money! This is certainly a tremendous deduction from the farming capital of a country so destitute of such capital as Ireland, and when we consider that this emigration is increasing; that it is even extending itself among persons of substantial means-we feel we have before us a prospect of the larger portion of the effective and at present employed farming capital of the country being, before many years more, removed altogether! Those who understand the state of Ireland and are aware of the mischiefs and multifold distresses arising even now from her want of capital available for employment in agricultural and farming in general, will, at once, see the magnitude of all this evil, arising out of the emigration of the small farming population of the country.

In the next place, we should remember that the feelings and wishes of the Protestant population are all on the side of England, and of property, and of law. They have never forgotten that they are the descendants of the original English and Scottish settlers, inheriting their names, their language, their habits, and their religion, and they are, therefore, in all their feelings and interest, attached to British connections; they are ever recognized as loyal to the crown, and obedient to the laws, so much so as to have their excessive loyalty often cast in their teeth as a crime, by their enemies; while every magistrate in the island is aware that they were the only individuals upon whom the civil powers could depend with confidence for assistance in the time of need. The country gentlemen too, can testify whether they were not the ever ready supporters of the due influence of rank and property, whenever assailed by priests and agitators. Truly they were a class of men, orderly, steady, industrious, loyal, and religious, who, as a body, had no superiors in their class in any nation in the world, and yet these are the very individuals who are emigrating in such numbers, leaving the interests of England and of pro

perty at the mercy of a populace untamed and uneducated, bigoted and inflammable, and fitted to be the willing tools and slaves of every knavish priest, and every factious agitator. We know of no more terrible event in reference to the connection of the two islands, than the threatened emigration of the Irish Protestants, and we can imagine nothing more likely to shake the whole settlement of property in this island, than the removal of that very population which has ever proved itself attached to all the interests of property; a population embracing, not the mere labouring and impoverished peasantry, whose exportation would be a blessing, but the thriving, the industrious, the respectable, the English-like farming and yeoman classes of the people, upon whose intelligence, loyalty and industry, much of the prosperity as well as safety of the country is dependent.

In our former article on this subject we entered on a detailed, though concise, history of the emigration of the Protestants from Ireland, and we, at the same time, touched upon the cause that led to such a melancholy result. We shall now again touch upon the latter particular, in order that the public may see clearly the circumstances which operate in promoting an evil of such paramount magnitude. We ascribe this hopeless evil to the unsettled and unhappy state of the country, arising from the radically defective system adopted by the landlords and the wholly unsuitable principles which have been acted on by the government.

I. THE LANDLORDS.-The great object of ambition with an Irish landlord, next to the enlargement of his rentroll, is the extension of his electioneering influence. Previous to the year 1793, when the measure for granting the elective franchise to the Catholics was carried, and thus broke the seal which had so long closed the fountain of Catholic claims and Catholic aggressions, this object of ambition was found actively ministering as a handmaid to the promotion of Protestantism throughout the length and breadth of the island, for, as in those precedent times, the elective franchise was strictly confined to the Protestants, so that it became the interest of all who were ambitious of electioneering influences,

to plant them on their estates, and to encourage them throughout the country, for thus the political power of the proprietor was in exact proportion to the numerical amount of his Protestant tenantry; under such circumstances the inducements held out to the settlements, and increase of Protestants of the lower orders were many and great, and though such a state of things ceased with the unfortunate measure of 1793, yet the leases which had previously been made, were still in existence; those leases were made in vast numbers to the Protestant tenantry, during the period that intervened between the passing of the Octennial Bill, in 1768, and the Franchise Bill, in 1793; they were, in general, for three young lives, and, in the natural course of things, those lives began to drop rapidly, and the leases consequently to fall in, from about the year 1820, to the present times; many of them still remain unexpired, but, by far the greater portion have already fallen in, and those which remain must follow in a very few years.

This circumstance, though natural and simple in itself, has more materially affected the Protestant population than an unobservant person would have supposed, and has prepared the way for much of the emigration of which we write. Those Protestant tenants finding their leases expired, and receiving no preference for a renewal of their leases, either as Protestants or as old tenants, and being unable to give the rents demanded, or rather to pay the rent which new applicants offer to a necessitous landlord, are obliged to surrender the lands which their families possessed for perhaps more than half a century, and being thus thrown on their own resources, are induced to turn their attention to America. Those tenants, too, whose leases have not as yet actually expired, but who anticipate only a few years more of possession, have begun to think that they will act most prudently for themselves and their families, by disposing of their leases while they have yet any remaining interest in them,-for, judging by the fate of others, they conclude that they also will be obliged to surrender their farms at the expiration of their leases. They thus dispose, at once, of all they

possess, and emigrate while they can raise the means of doing so on the remaining term of their leases. To these causes, then, is to be ascribed a large proportion of the emigration of the old Protestant tenantry during the last few years.

It is not easy for those who are not conversant with the character and habits of our peasantry, to conceive why such circumstances should necessarily lead to the removal or the emigration of the Protestants any more than the Catholics, or why the former, any more than the latter, should be unable to take out a renewal of the lease on the terms of the landlord. This seeming difficulty, however, vanishes away with those who have observed the respective character and habits of our rustic population; for the Protestant and Catholic peasantry are beings of a different kind-animals of a totally different order; and the industrious and steady. settler of America is not more different from the wild and restless Indian of its native forests, than are those two classes of the peasantry of Ireland. This difference is preserved, even in the taking of land, to such an extent, that there is universally understood to be what is called a Protestant price and a Popish price for land; the rent readily offered by the latter being greater than that ever offered by the former; so that a Catholic tenantry is far more lucrative than a Protestant tenantry to the landlord. This fact is now universally acknowledged, and has arisen from the habits of these respective classes. The Protestant requires decent clothing, good feeding, and a certain portion of education for his family. He cultivates cleanliness in his house and person, and displays an independence of mind and conduct in all things: all these matters require some expenditure; and when he proposes for a farm, he coolly calculates what rent he will be able to pay. The Romanist, on the other hand, merely calculates whether he shall be able to make the rent; for as he is contented with the least and worst possible clothing and feeding, and is very easy as to the quality of education for his family, and is most philosophically careless about cleanliness, and everything that savours of external decency and com