Another cause which has of late years contributed, in some measure, to keep Cornwall free from the burthen of a surplus population of working men must not be overlooked. Emigration has been more largely resorted to in that county than, perhaps, in any other in England. Out of the population of the Penzance Union alone nearly five per cent. left their native land for Australia or New Zealand in 1849. The potato blight is assigned as the chief cause of this, for it has damaged seriously the growth of a vegetable from the sale of which in the London markets the Cornish agriculturist derived large profits, and on which (with their fish) the Cornish poor depended as a staple article of food. It is by the mines and fisheries that Cornwall is compensated for a soil too barren in many parts of the country to be ever cultivated except at such an expenditure of capital as no mere farmer can afford. From the inexhaustible treasures in the earth, and from the equally inexhaustible shoals of pilchards which annually visit the coast, the working population of Cornwall derived their regular means of support where agriculture would fail them. At the mines the regular rate of wages is from forty to fifty shillings a month; but miners have opportunities of making more than this. By what is termed working “on tribute,” that is, agreeing to excavate the mineral lodes for a percentage on the value of the metal they raise, some of them have been known to make as much as six and even ten pounds a month. Even when they are unlucky in their working speculations, or perhaps thrown out of employment altogether by the shutting up of a mine, they have a fair opportunity of obtaining farm labour, which is paid for (out of harvest time) at the rate of nine shillings a week. But this is a resource of which they are rarely obliged to take advantage. A plot of common ground is included with the cottages that are let to them; and the cultivation of this helps to keep them and their families in bad times, until they find an opportunity of resuming work; when they may perhaps make as much in one month as an agricultural labourer can in twelve. The fisheries not only employ all the inhabitants of the coast, but in the pilchard season many of the farm people work as well. Ten thousand persons, men, women, and children, derive their regular support from the fisheries, which are so amazingly productive that the “drift,” or deep‐sea fishing, in Mount’s Bay alone, is calculated to realise, on the average, £30,000 per annum.