quarter of an acre clause test for relief your creation? Were not the
most conspicuous names on your committee the abettors of an amendment as
iniquitous as it was selfish--viz., to remove the poor-rates from their
own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry? Are not they the same
members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the
continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English
statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or
hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in
this Catholic emigration plan? What good could we expect from such a
Nazareth?"[289]

The Prime Minister did not take up the great colonization scheme. He
said, in the House of Commons, on the 29th of April, that he declined,
on the part of the Government, assuming the responsibility of providing
for the absorption of the great excess of labour then existing in
Ireland. "I deny," said Lord John, "on the part of the Government, the
responsibility of completely, still less suddenly, resolving that
question. What we can do, and what we, the Government, have endeavoured
to do is, to mitigate present suffering."

The Government was of opinion that emigration, left to itself, would
transfer the starving people to the United States and British America,
as quickly as they could be provided for in those countries. This
calculation turned out to be correct enough, as the following figures
will show:--Emigration from Ireland in the year 1845 is set down at
74,969; it increased in 1846 to 105,955, although the Famine had not to
the full extent turned the minds of the people to seek homes in the New
World. The emigration of 1847 more than doubled that of 1846, being
215,444; ti fell in 1848 to 178,159, but in 1849 the emigration of 1847
was repeated, the emigrants of that year being 214,425, of which 2,219
were orphan girls from the Workhouses. The magnitude of the exodus was
maintained in 1850, that year giving 209,054 voluntary exiles; but the
emigration in 1851, which year closed the decade, quite outstripped that
of any previous year, the figure in that year standing at 257,372.[290]

The census of 1841 shows the population of Ireland to have been in that
year 8,175,124. Taking the usual ratio of births over deaths, it should
have increased in 1851 to 9,018,799, instead of which it fell to
6,552,385; thus, being nearly two millions and a-half less than it
should have been. These two