Page:The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery.djvu/61

 considered her worth from 1,000 to 1,500 dollars—i.e., of that much value to himself. We know in the case of our own West India slaves, that our Parliament estimated their value to their owners at £20,000,000, the annual interest of which we taxpayers have still to provide. But how stands the British or Irish slave in respect of marketable value? In Ireland his value stands so high that, only a few years ago, the landlords of Kilkenny county, with the Marquis of Ormond at their head, actually memorialized the Government to relieve Ireland from the presence of 2,000,000 of the peasantry, offering to assist the Government even pecuniarily in any scheme of emigration or transportation, or expatriation or extermination, it might set on foot for that purpose! Indeed, hardly a Parliamentary session has passed over, for the last twenty years, without witnessing some kind of project, or proposal, or suggestion for getting rid of Ireland's "surplus population." Up to the winter of 1846-47 (the year of the famine) 2,000,000, at least, of the population were uniformly condemned as surplus! Instead of being considered worth so much per head, like the negroes, it was deemed worth making a pecuniary sacrifice to rid the land of them. At £10 per head, these 2,000,000 would fetch just the sum which the West India planters thought a very inadequate remuneration for the loss of their slaves. Instead of asking £10 per head for them, the Irish owners and occupiers of the land were disposed to give £10 per head to get rid of them. They would have jumped at the bargain, could they have found the money and the purchasers. Fortunately for those patriotic and Christian gentlemen, the famine of 1846-47 came to carry off about a million of the surplus. Emigration and starvation have since relieved them of another large batch. Starvation being a cheaper process than emigration, it is the favourite scheme of the Irish proprietary classes. But as there were then, and still are, many refractory Irish who hold the rich man's laws of meum and tuum in less respect than they do the great law of nature which forbids any man to starve in a land of abundance, the landowners and occupiers have found it necessary, and for their interest, to contribute largely to the emigration of the last few years. They have in this way expended some hundreds of thousands of pounds, besides sacrificing many times that amount in the voluntary cancelling of debts and in the remission of arrears of rent due. At all events, the proprietary classes of Ireland have furnished, and do still continue to furnish, proofs innumerable and irrefragable that they consider their white slaves as not only valueless, but to be worth considerably less than nothing, seeing that they will give something very considerable to get quit of them. There's the marketable value of an Irish white slave!

And how stands the case in England? Not very dissimilar from Ireland. Are not the ominous words, "surplus population," as familiar to us upon this side of St. George's Channel as they are to our Irish brethren upon the other side? Have we not all manner of emigration schemes afloat here, as well as there, to get rid of the surplus? How often has it been proposed to raise a gigantic loan of