gentlemen, and some members of the House of Peers, and the public-minded folk of their day, to say … what the Government should do is to establish colonies abroad, and take the people abroad; there is not employment enough for them here either in agriculture or manufactures." Such persons "wanted a general system of emigration, under which families by the thousand might be taken away to countries of which they knew nothing, to scenes to. which they were unaccustomed, to hardships and dangers and misfortunes of which they had no accurate conception. All that was to be done. Well, the people have stayed at home. The law was altered so that the bread for them was brought here, and trade extended. You have added in Great Britain alone more than ten millions to your population in forty years. Now you find continually that if you have a good harvest trade will be good, there will be great scarcity of goods, wages will further advance; but I have no doubt some of those people who, forty years ago, wanted to send you (?) all abroad, will have some other nostrum and panacea of emigration equally absurd and impossible."
These observations were addressed to a popular audience, the majority being factory operatives; yet a statesman should not have represented, even to such persons, the cases of England in 1840 and in 1881 as alike, nor have left out of sight the reasons for promoting emigration that did not apply then, do apply now, and are summarized in par. 2. of my Scheme. Mr. Bright mentioned modestly that the bread for the people has been brought to them here (thanks to him, Mr. Cobden, and the League). He remembered the fine flour and wheat, but forgot the beasts and sheep, and wine, and oil; the butter, cheese, eggs, fish, fowl, fruit, pork, mutton, and beef. He did not say a word about steamships fitted with refrigerators for conveying frozen meat from the Antipodes; nor tell his unsophisticated listeners whole fleets are employed exclusively in carrying hither from Denmark, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Africa, Canada; North, aye. South, American States, live oxen and sheep—a portentous fact, having no precedent in history, ancient or modern.
The Right Hon. gentleman kept to himself the startling circumstance that very considerably more than what is wanted for feeding the additional ten millions has to be brought hundreds and thousands of miles, often literally from the ends of the earth, at prodigious cost, not that consumers may live more
