Twenty-two years have passed since Señor Mella y Cea took up his pen on behalf of the peasants of Galicia, but their condition can hardly be said to have improved. Heavy taxes still ruin those who are powerless to pay them. State loans to agriculturists are as yet unknown, and co-operative credit societies are only a dream of the future. Capital is monopolised by the few, and in the absence of credit banks the production of the soil is checked. The difficulty is, as Prudhon pointed out, to know how to enable the greatest possible number of people to produce and consume the greatest possible amount. Señor Mella y Cea did not think that emigration could be truly beneficial to any country in the long run, because, by its very existence, it reveals a state of things that is not satisfactory; it reveals, but it in no way helps to correct or remedy, what is wrong. Many emigrate because they find themselves forced to choose between death and emigration. And who has a right to decide for such people which of the two evils they shall choose? Every man has a perfect right to abandon the country in which his means of existence cannot be guaranteed. Emigration is, after all, a lesser evil than starvation; but, alas! it is not as a rule the most necessitous who emigrate, but the most energetic, the most ambitious, the most capable. We have only to turn our eyes in the direction of Ireland to see this truth exemplified. Norway is another country that complains bitterly of the emigration of her most stalwart sons.[194] The man who is worth his salt does not leave without regret, without sorrow, the land of his birth; nearly all who go cherish the hope that they may some day return. It is not _en masse_, like the Tartars described by De Quincey, but drop by drop, that the country’s life-blood ebbs away. “Emigration is a poison which prolongs our life upon the borders of the tomb.” No, it can never be favourable to Galicia, it can never be anything better than a harmful alternative. “At any rate,” wrote the above-quoted writer, “if Gallegans must emigrate, let them choose South America--a country where men are wanted, where there is room for all. When they emigrated to other parts of Spain, they only took the bread from other mouths to put it in their own. South America is the land of the future; it will leave Europe behind as surely as Europe did Asia.”