Enough has, perhaps, been said by way of demonstrating necessity for a safety-valve that prescient statesmanship would have set at work forty years ago, thereby preventing evils that can hardly be cured. I contend that—(1) the British people must, like the Japanese, in the long run subsist upon the total sum of products, in every kind, of labour exercised, and savings, within their islands. (2) Our unparalleled population has far outstripped the inherent powers to sustain, of the small territory known as Great Britain. (3) Consequently, in lieu of getting richer, as platitudinarians suppose, the nation grows poorer, while the situation is aggravated by the addition of now nearly half a million souls annually. (4) Other countries, ceasing to be our debtors, become creditors for supplies we are compelled to draw from them, and which it is fallacious to say are taken as a matter of choice in exchange for this, that, or the other. Certain party leaders and literary men may, indeed, yearly judge our position as they would that of the mechanic going to market to lay out his week's earnings, who, if he spends more than he spent last Saturday must, somehow, have acquired greater purchasing power;—but the operations of the import trade are not conducted in this primitive fashion. (5) While agricultural production goes down, our exports, or "exchanges," far from rising pari passu with the census, likewise fall off. (6) For the common weal. State intervention in a rare emergency is a plain duty, the adversaries of paternal government notwithstanding. (7) The form it must take is the organization of a gigantic system, for which I devised the title heading this page—partly to distinguish it from mere assistance, which could do little good, partly because "directing," in the sense of administering and executing, a vast work of colonization, is an appropriate task for rulers of an Empire whereon the sun sets not.
My ideas as to the method of alleviating impending calamities, first stated generally to the Premier of the day in August, 1877, took a distinct embodiment in a Scheme[1] submitted to Mr. Gladstone in three letters, dated November 26, 28, and 29, 1880. If this "comprehensive scheme of emigration,"[2] as it is called in the official acknowledgment from
- ↑ Printed in its latest, finally revised form, on page 31.
- ↑ The Right Hon. James Lowther, M.P., at Richmond (Yorkshire), on January 29, 1883, said that "the emigration which he recommended was, not the driving out of the able-bodied, leaving the aged, or young, or helpless; but a comprehensive and State-directed scheme, which should enable whole families to be simultaneously but not compulsorily emigrated" (from Ireland to Canada).
