The Free-Trade party, at a loss to explain this prodigious emigration, at a time when legislative principles were adopted, which, according to them, were diffusing universal prosperity, laboured hard to refer it to other causes. In the first instance, they said it was owing to the Irish famine; in the last, to Nature having scattered gold broadcast over the distant regions of the earth. Both excuses are devoid of foundation. The potato famine occurred in 1846; and since that time the harvests have been so good that, _twice over_, a public thanksgiving has been returned for that blessing. If Free Trade has really enriched the people of Great Britain, it should only have _enhanced_, except for other competitors, the market for Irish wheat, oats, and cattle, in the British Islands. It is rather too late in 1852, six years after the famine of 1846, to be reverting to that calamity as a cause of the present exodus; the more especially as, in the interim, between death and emigration, two millions of souls have disappeared in the Emerald Isle.[7] The pretext of the immense and increasing emigration being owing to the discovery of the Californian and Australian diggings is equally futile and unfounded. Five thousand a-week are now going there, a large proportion of whom may reasonably be considered as having been set in motion by the El Dorado visions connected with those regions. But supposing that sixty thousand emigrants this year land in Australia, of whom forty thousand have been attracted by the diggings, there will still remain three hundred thousand emigrants who have left the British shores, chiefly for the United States, irrespective of the gold mania. What is the cause of this long-continued exodus of our people?—a state of things not only unparalleled in the previous annals of this country, but unexampled in the whole previous history of the world. There is but one explanation can be given of it: the _Spectator_, in an able article on this subject, has very candidly stated the cause—it is _want of employment_ which drives so many abroad. Go where you will among the middle and working-classes, and you will hear this cause assigned as the real reason why so many are going abroad; and equally universal is the lamentation, that the persons going away are the very _élite_ of our people—the young, the energetic, the industrious; leaving only children, and aged or decrepit paupers to conduct the industry of the country, and furnish recruits to sustain its future fortunes.