Page:Irish Emigration and The Tenure of Land in Ireland.djvu/63

Rh the population must be checked; or its standard of comfort must deteriorate; or its accruing surplus must remove. But the first necessitates an artificial and often an unnatural social system, as is said to prevail in France; and the next is an alternative which entails the physical degradation we have seen supervene in Ireland. There remains therefore the third,—a course in perfect harmony with the laws of nature, and one which has already established the religion, the language, and the freedom of England, over one-fourth of the habitable globe. To lament the exhibition of so much enterprise, vital energy, and colonising power, in the race to which we belong, seems to me more