Page:State directed emigration.djvu/28

 The circumstance that within one single quarter of the century food imports tripled in value is passed over as unimportant by the framers of fantastic calculations of freights, "almost wholly profit to this country"; once so high that all that had ships in the sea were made rich by the homeward traffic; and who ignore on the one hand that these cargoes promptly disappear down British throats, on the other that there are heavy sets-off against such gains; called seamen's wages, stores, foreign port dues, losses, repairs, depreciation, interest on capital, invested or borrowed (a serious item when steamers are, as usually happens, heavily mortgaged), often by or from foreign capitalists, though the ships may sail under our flag. But, having decided that the tradition of England's wealth must hold good for all time, the opinion is to be maintained in spite of a consensus of impartial opinion, backed by observation and experience, that it has ceased to be true; and in defiance of evidence that while this country is one of the very smallest, it is the most densely peopled, of all civilized States, and contains by far the largest, and an unprecedented, percentage of useless mouths, reckoning as "useless" from the point of view of the political economist, paupers (adults and children), halt, blind, sick, mentally afflicted, criminals, vicious men and women; animals; producing nothing: whose maintenance must in the end be found by producers or toilers.

The only solutions or palliatives for the difficulties that have been sketched, which are propounded by opponents of "the cruel and reckless one of emigration," may be enumerated as Crime, Spade husbandry, Potatoe or Wheat cultivation, and Nationalization of the Land. The last could not help any class, unless confiscation and re-partition are intended, when many