The form in which rents, profits, and savings, as well as taxes, went to England, was that of raw products of the soil, to be consumed abroad, yielding nothing to be returned to the land, which was of course impoverished. The average export of grain in the first three years following the passage of the Act of Union was about 300,000 quarters, but as the domestic market gradually disappeared, the export of raw produce increased, until, at the close of twenty years it exceeded a million of quarters; and at the date of Mr. Inglis's visit it had reached an average of two and a half millions, or 22,500,000 of our bushels. The poor people were, in fact, selling their soil to pay for cotton and woollen goods that they should have manufactured themselves, for coal which abounded among themselves, for iron, all the materials of which existed at home in great profusion, and for a small quantity of tea, sugar, and other foreign commodities, while the amount required to pay rent to absentees, and interest to mortgagees, was estimated at more than thirty millions of dollars. Here was a drain that no nation could bear, however great its productive power; and the whole of it was due to the system which forbade the application of labour, talent, or capital to any thing but agriculture, and thus forbade advance in civilization. The inducements to remain at home steadily diminished. Those who could live without labour found that society had changed; and they fled to England, France, or Italy. Those who desired to work, and felt that they were qualified for something beyond mere manual labour, fled to England or America; and thus by degrees was the unfortunate country depleted of every thing that could render it a home in which to remain, while those who could not fly remained to be, as the _Times_ so well describes it, mere "hewers of wood and drawers of water to the Saxon," happy when a full-grown man could find employment at _sixpence a day_, and that, too, without food. "Throughout the west and south of Ireland," said an English traveller in 1842, four years before the exhaustion of the soil had produced disease among the potatoes-- "The traveller is haunted by the face of the _popular starvation_. It is not the exception--it is _the condition_ of the people. In this fairest and richest of countries, men are suffering and _starving by millions_. There are thousands of them, at this minute, stretched in the sunshine at their cabin doors with _no work_, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly. Strong countrymen are lying in bed, '_for the hunger_'--because a man lying on his back does not need so much food as a person afoot. Many of them have torn up the unripe potatoes from their little gardens, and to exist now must look to winter, when they shall have to suffer starvation and cold too."--_Thackeray_.