3415. “Is not the selection in some degree dependent on the general state of society?”—“Very much on moral causes, on their being in so respectable a situation that they are in the habit of looking forward, and exercising a certain degree of prudence; and there is no doubt that in different countries this kind of prudence is exercised in very different degrees.” 3416. “Does it depend at all on the government under which they live?”—“Very much on the government, on the strict and equal administration of justice, on the perfect security of property, on civil, religious, and political liberty; for people respect themselves more under favourable circumstances of this kind, and are less inclined to marry, with[out] the prospect of more physical sustenance for their children.” 3417. “On the degree of respect with which they are treated by their superiors?”—“Yes; one of the greatest faults in Ireland is that the labouring classes there are not treated with proper respect by their superiors; they are treated as if they were a degraded people.” Thereupon he is again asked a leading question of a somewhat cynical character, but he is again cautious in his answer. 3418. “Does not that treatment mainly arise from their existing in such redundancy as to be no object to their superiors?”—“In part it does perhaps; but it appeared to take place before that [redundancy] was the case, to the same degree.” The questioner, however, begs the question and asks: 3419. “The number being the cause of their treatment, will not their treatment tend to the increase of that number?” and the answer is: “Yes, they act and react on each other.” Accordingly his opinion in 1827 is, as it was in 1803, that emigration conjoined with other agencies will be good for Ireland, but by itself will leave matters no better than they were. Alongside of his weighty words in the essay and in the evidence it is worth while to place the words written by Adam Smith half a century earlier:— “By the union with England, the middling and inferior ranks of people in Scotland gained a complete deliverance from the power of an aristocracy which had always before oppressed them. By a union with Great Britain, the greater part of the people of all ranks in Ireland would gain an equally complete deliverance from a much more oppressive aristocracy, an aristocracy not founded, like that of Scotland, in the natural and respectable distinctions of birth and fortune, but in the most odious of all distinctions, those of religious and political prejudices; distinctions which, more than any other, animate both the insolence of the oppressors and the hatred and indignation of the oppressed, and which commonly render the inhabitants of the same country more hostile to one another than those of different countries ever are.”[437]