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 aud 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 skeleton of what it once had been. All this has taken place chiefly during the last

B

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 is 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 Protes tant population, from north to south,

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 emigra tion, 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.

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. It 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 se, riously 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