Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/161

Rh Wherever you go the same deleterious influence signalizes its presence by analogous, if not by identical effects. In the South and West the poison has infiltrated the system itself, breeding monstrous excrescences in the shape of the middleman and the rack-rented cottier. In the North it has manifested its presence by a parasitical growth of inflated tenant-right prices, as effectually fatal to the healthy expansion of our agricultural industry. The original cause of the disease is everywhere the same. The disproportion of the opportunities of employment to population has resulted in universal pressure and universal competition,—competition in the labour market, already modified by emigration; competition in the land market—only to be relieved by the application to more profitable occupations of so much of the productive energies of the nation, as may be in excess of the requirements of a perfect agriculture.