This view is, as the reader will see, based upon the idea of the total destruction of the commodities consumed. Were it even correct, it would still follow that there had been transferred from Ireland to England a demand for services of a thousand kinds, tending to cause a rise in the price of labour in the one and a fall in the other;--but if it were altogether incorrect, it would then follow, necessarily, that the loss to the country _would_ be as great as if the remittances were "a tribute paid to a foreign state, or even as if they were periodically thrown into the sea." That it is altogether incorrect the reader may readily satisfy himself. Man consumes much, but he destroys nothing. In eating food he is merely acting as a machine for preparing the elements of which it is composed for future production; and the more he can take out of the land the more he can return to it, and the more rapid will be the improvement in the productive power of the soil. If the market be at hand, he can take hundreds of bushels of turnips, carrots, or potatoes, or tons of hay, from an acre of land, and he can vary the character of his culture from year to year, and the more he borrows from the great bank the more he can repay to it, the more he can improve his mind and his cultivation, and the more readily he can exchange for improved machinery by aid of which to obtain still increased returns. If, however, the market be distant, he must raise only those things that will bear carriage, and which from their small yield command a high price, and thus is he limited in his cultivation, and the more he is limited the more rapidly he exhausts his land, the less is his power to obtain roads, to have association with his fellow-men, to obtain books, to improve his mode of thought, to make roads, or to purchase machinery. Such is the case even when he is compelled to sell and buy in distant markets, but still worse is it when, as in the case of the rent of the absentee, nothing is returned to the land, for then production diminishes without a corresponding diminution of the rent, and the poor cultivator is more and more thrown upon the mercy of the land-owner or his agent, and becomes, as we see to have been the case in Jamaica and India, practically a slave. This state of things has in all countries been followed by a diminution of population resulting from starvation or from exportation; and hence it is that we see the destruction of life in Ireland, India, and the West Indies, while from the two former vast numbers are annually exported, many of them to perish in the new countries to which they are driven. Out of 99,000 that left Ireland for Canada in a single year, no less than 13,000 perished on shipboard, and thousands died afterward of disease, starvation, and neglect; and thus it is that we have the horrors of "the middle passage" repeated in our day. It is the slave trade of the last century reproduced on a grander scale and on a new theatre of action.