“Yes; and food would be almost as much too dear under your system as under the present. At present, the competition for food is so excessive that men bid their labour against each other to desperation. Under your pauper-farm system, the same thing would take place in time; and in the meanwhile, every bushel of wheat would cost twice or thrice as much labour as in Van Diemen’s Land; so that both immediately and ultimately, you oblige a certain number to pay higher for their food than they need do and therefore ought to do.—And this without taking into consideration the change in the proportion of capital to population which is caused by emigration,—a change most beneficial to the mother country.” “And how extensive do you conceive that change to be? There is very little difference between the cost of conveying persons to Van Diemen’s Land, and settling them on a pauper farm,—too small a difference to warrant such an expression as yours.” “In addition to this difference, there is all the increase of production which will take place abroad, and which is so much gained to the mother country, since it maintains her people. Besides this, all that would have been unproductively consumed by the pauper descendants of these emigrants may be considered as so much clear gain to the community. Again,—the thriving population of our colonies will want more and more of our manufactures, and will send us their agricultural produce in exchange; and I suppose you will not question the advantage of investing our capital in manufactures, and receiving wool and wheat of the best quality in return, instead of laying it out on lands of inferior fertility at home, while the people scantily supply themselves with the coarse manufactures of their own firesides? You will not question the duty of availing ourselves of the advantages of division of labour in the case of our greatest need? Yet you would, by your plan of home colonization, deprive the people of this reciprocity of benefits. You would set up new manufactures instead of a new market for them; and all for the sake of producing food at a greater cost than under the emigration system. You are clearly wrong, Fellowes, depend upon it. What a pity that you should not turn your zeal and benevolence and your other resources to the best account!” “The fact is,” replied Fellowes, “that on a matter of so much importance as this, I am anxious to go on sure ground. I have heard so much on good authority of the miseries of emigrants in Canada and elsewhere, and I have seen so much with my own eyes of the benefits of the Home-Colonization system in the Netherlands, that I am induced to do that which I know will produce great and immediate good, instead of that whose consequences I cannot witness or calculate. I want to give our poor neighbours food; and I dare not run the risk of having them perish with cold and hunger in the woods before they can get any.”