A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation
and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to
provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief
of the _labour market_. Various causes have now conspired to render
this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued
agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident
habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of
1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of
£10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and
treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so
completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be
regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of
_officina pauperiei_, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly
issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who
left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand,
but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which
incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first
nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was
49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the
last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in
_five_ months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of
Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of
_nearly_ 100,000 _a-year_; and these squalid immigrants, let it be
recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the
effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the disastrous
stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions,
become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single
city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are
already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory
against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have
expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the
invasion of 1812.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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