But such great measures would require money. The average cost of each emigrant so transported and looked to in the colony would be £6 or £7; three or four hundred thousand persons so provided with the means of emigration would cost from £2,000,000 to £2,500,000 a-year. Granted.--Could the money be better bestowed? It would not yield no return, like that devoted to making good Irish roads bad ones: it would convert three hundred thousand paupers annually into consumers of British manufactures to the amount of three or four pounds a head: it would add £1,000,000 or £1,200,000 a-year to the export of British manufactures: it would secure a durable vent for our goods by planting British descendants in the New World: it would spread joy and comfort through Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, not less than Tipperary and Galway: it would extinguish--and extinguish by means of Christian beneficence--the flame of disaffection in the realm: it would give to our people all that French socialism has that is really beneficial, and save them from the unutterable and incalculable evils with which it is fraught: it would restore the balance between capital and industry, so grievously and ruinously deranged by the effects of free-trade of late years: it would go far to alleviate the misery which the pernicious dogmas regarding the currency have spread through the country. For blessings such as these, is the issue of exchequer bills to the extent of two or three millions a-year for some years an extravagant price to pay? Would not _five times the sum_ be at once borrowed by the state in a single year if war were to break out with France or America? Are the dangers of any such war to be compared to those which must inevitably be incurred if the present frightful mass of pauperism, idleness, and destitution, is allowed to continue unrelieved, and to go on increasing in the country? What must, in the end, be the result of such a state of things, but internal anarchy, foreign degradation, ultimate ruin? And is there no obligation upon those whose policy since 1846 has brought these calamities on the nation, to apply the national credit in the attempt at least to relieve them? Hear the just and eloquent observations of the _Times_ on the subject:--