he principle cause of emigration is the
poverty and depressed state of the country; and it follows naturally,
that whatever occasions our poverty will necessarily occasion
emigration. The first cause of our poverty then, is Absenteeism, which,
by drawing six or seven millions out of the country, deprives our people
of employment and means of life to that amount. The next is the general
inattention of Irish landlords to the state and condition of their
own property, and an inexcusable want of sympathy with their tenantry,
which, indeed, is only a corollary from the former; for it can hardly
be expected that those who wilfully neglect themselves will feel a
warm interest in others. The next is the evil of subletting, by which
property becomes overloaded with human beings, who, for the most part,
are bound by no ties whatsoever to the owner of the soil. He is
not their landlord, nor are they his tenants; and so far from their
interests being in any way reciprocal, they are actually adversative.
It is his interest to have them removed, and, as circumstances
unfortunately stand, it is theirs to remain, inasmuch as their
alternative is ruin since they have no place of shelter to receive them.

Political corruption, in the shape of the forty-shilling franchise, was
another cause, and one of the very worst, which led to the prostration
of the country by poverty and moral degradation, and for this the
proprietors of the soil are solely responsible. Nor can the use of the
potato, as the staple food of the laboring classes, in connection with
the truck system, and the consequent absence of money payments, in
addition to the necessary ignorance of domestic and social comforts
that resulted from them, be left out of this wretched catalogue of our
grievances. Another cause of emigration is to be found in the high and
exorbitant rents at which land is held by all classes of farmers--with
some exceptions we admit, as in the case of old leases--but especially
by those who hold under middlemen, or on the principle of subletting
generally. By this system a vast deal of distress and petty but most
harrassing oppression is every day in active operation upon the property
of the head landlord, which he can never know, and for which he is in no
other way responsible unless by having ever permitted the existence of
it for any purpose whatsoever.

In a country distracted like Ireland, it would be impossible to omit the
existence of political an