out which,
he said, the most extravagant expectations had been excited and
entertained in Ireland, but which never could be realized. Emigration
did not, he said, consist in landing a certain number of people on the
shores of America; they should be looked to when they would arrive
there; and his opinion was, that the best mode of promoting emigration
was by affording aid on the arrival of the emigrants at the place of
their destination. This had been extensively done, the previous year, at
Montreal, and he should be sorry to give any other stimulus to
emigration. He then went on to prove that Ireland was not overpeopled;
and as it was not, emigration, in his opinion, had not become a
necessity for that country. He again quoted Sir Robert Kane, who had
stated that there were resources in Ireland, which, if properly
developed, would enable that country to maintain seventeen millions of
inhabitants. He, Lord John, did not go so far as that, but he did not
think the population of the country was excessive, and there was
nothing in the country to prevent the highest improvement. Other
countries, he said, had been quite as badly off as Ireland was now
asserted to be, which were, at present, in the highest state of
prosperity.

To illustrate this he would read a description of a country, in which
the following evils were said to exist. The writer, an old English
author, says:--"The husbandman be thrust out of their own, or else
either by covin or fraud, or violent oppression, they be put beside it;
or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied, that they be compelled to
sell all. By one means, therefore, or by the other, either by hook or by
crook, they must needs depart away, poor wretched souls--men, women,
husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their
young babes, and the whole household, small in substance, and much in
number, as husbandry requires many hands. Away they trudge, I say, out
of their known and accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All
their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well
abide the sale--yet, being suddenly thrust out, they be constrained to
sell it for a thing of nought; and, when they have wandered about till
that be spent, what can they then do but steal, and then justly pardy be
hanged, or else go about a-begging? Sir," said the Prime Minister, "is
this vivid description unlike the story of an ejectment in Ireland?--of
an ejectment, wh