We are told of the principle of population that men increase faster than food, and, for evidence that such must always be the case, are pointed to the fact that when men are few in number they always cultivate the rich soils, and then food is abundant, but as population increases they are forced to resort to the poor soils, and then food becomes scarce. That the contrary of all this is the fact is shown by the history of England, France, Italy, Greece, India, and every other nation of the world, and is proved in our own day by all that is at this moment being done in this country. It is proved by the fact that Ireland possesses millions of acres of the most fertile soil remaining in a state of nature, and so likely to remain until she shall have markets for their produce that will enable their owners readily to exchange turnips, potatoes, cabbages, and hay, for cloth, machinery, and MANURE. It is singular that all the political economists of England should so entirely have overlooked the fact that man is a mere borrower from the earth, and that when he does not pay his debts, she does as do all other creditors, that is, she expels him from his holding. England makes of her soil a grand reservoir for the waste yielded by all the sugar, coffee, wool, indigo, cotton and other raw commodities of almost half the world, and thus does she raise a crop that has been valued at five hundred millions of dollars, or five times more than the average value of the cotton crop produced by so many millions of people in this country; and yet so important is manure that she imports in a single year more than two hundred thousand tons of guano, at a cost of almost two millions of pounds, and thus does she make labour productive and land valuable. Nevertheless, her writers teach other nations that the true mode of becoming rich is to exhaust the land by sending from it all its products in their rudest state, and then, when the people of Ireland attempt to follow the soil which they have sent to England, the people of the latter are told by Mr. McCulloch that "The unexampled misery of the Irish people is directly owing to the excessive augmentation of their numbers; and, nothing can be more perfectly futile than to expect any real or lasting amendment of their situation until an effectual check has been given to the progress of population. It is obvious too," he continues, "that the low and degraded condition into which the people of Ireland are now sunk is the condition to which every people must be reduced whose numbers continue, for any considerable period, to increase faster than the means of providing for their comfortable and decent subsistence."--_Principles_, 383.