Secretary of
State, explained in detail a plan of emigration from Ireland, then under
the consideration of Government, and which was afterwards carried into
effect. The emigrants were sent to Canada; and Peterborough, at the time
a very insignificant place, was fixed upon as their head quarters. On
two subsequent occasions, Mr. Horton stated this emigration to have been
eminently successful, which was fully corroborated by the evidence of
Captain Rubidge, before the Lords' Committee of 1847, on "Colonization
from Ireland." But this emigration, as well as that of 1825, both of
which were superintended by the Hon. Peter Robinson, was on a very
limited scale. The number taken out to Canada in the first emigration
was only 568 persons, men, women, and children. The Government supported
them for eighteen months after their landing, which very much increased
the expense; each of those emigrants having cost the country L22 before
they were finally settled. In 1825 Mr. Robinson took out 2,024 emigrants
under the same conditions, but in this instance the expense was slightly
diminished, the cost of each person being L21 10s. These emigrants also
prospered, but the money outlay in each case was so considerable, that
the experiment could not be extended, nor, in fact, repeated.[277]

From this period, committees continued to sit on the subject of
emigration, almost year after year; emigration from Ireland, even in the
absence of famine, being considered of the highest importance--and why?
Chiefly, because Irish labourers were lowering the rate of wages in the
English labour market--so it is stated in the report of the Select
Committee of 1826, in the following words:--"The question of emigration
from Ireland is decided by the population itself; and that which remains
for the legislature to decide is, whether it shall be turned to the
improvement of the British North American colonies, or whether it shall
be suffered and encouraged to take that which will be, and is, its
inevitable course, _to deluge Great Britain with poverty and
wretchedness_, and gradually, but certainly, to equalize the state of
the English and Irish peasantry. Two different rates of wages, and two
different conditions of the labouring classes, cannot permanently
co-exist. One of two results appears to be inevitable; the Irish
population must be raised towards the standard of the English, or the
English depressed towards that of the Irish. The question, whether