The memorialists assumed that the cultivation of the potato could not be persevered in, and that Ireland, in her existing condition, could not grow enough of corn food for six millions of people. Hence the necessity for an extensive emigration. They are not, they say, to be ranked among those who believe Ireland incapable of supporting its existing population in comfort, under other circumstances; far from it. On the contrary, they do not doubt that if "the social economy" of Ireland were made to resemble that of England, the population of Ireland might be larger than it then was. It was only under existing circumstances that the population of Ireland was redundant, and all they desired was a temporary decrease.
In the letter which accompanied the memorial to the Premier, the memorialists put their views, shortly, as follows:—1. The present condition of Ireland is such, that there must be, for some years, a vast increase of emigration, they, therefore, urge the necessity of what they call "systematic colonization," both for the advantage of the emigrants themselves, and the good of the colony to which they would emigrate. They think this colonization, "on a very large scale," ought to be made from Ireland to Canada, and that the State ought to lend its assistance to promote it. 2. In the second place they lay it down as an essential part of their scheme, that religious provision must be made for the emigrants. 3. They think there would be great advantage in enlisting private enterprise, in the form of agency, to carry out the plan. 4. Furthermore, there must be a willingness on the part of the nation to accept an income and property tax, for the purpose of defraying the cost of emigration: and, 5. To help the emigrants to settle on the land, "aids to location," as Mr. Godley called them, must be provided.
How was this vast scheme to be carried to a successful issue? A joint-stock company, to be called "The Irish Canadian Company," was to undertake the entire management of it. This Company was to be legalised by Act of Parliament, and recognised by the Canadian Government. It was to transmit to Canada and settle there a million and a half of the Irish people in three years, being at the rate of half a million a year. To do this, £9,000,000 was to be lent by the Government, at the rate of £3,000,000 each year, on the security of Irish property and an Irish income tax. This tax was to be one per cent. the first year, two per cent. the second year, three per cent. the third year, and to stand at three per cent. until the first instalment of the loan could be paid, and was, of course, to cease altogether when the last instalment was paid. Repayment was to be made at the rate of six and a half per cent., per annum, which would extinguish principal and interest in twenty two years.
The £9,000,000 so lent and to be so repaid, was to be expended in this manner: The passage money of each individual was computed at £3; of this the Government was to advance one pound, the emigrants themselves finding the other two in some way—to be given by friends—saved from wages—obtained from their landlords—however the £2 was to be found,—that sum was to be provided by the emigrant. One pound to each of one million and a-half of emigrants would absorb £1,500,000 of the £9,000,000. The joint-stock company that was to work the concern must, of course, have profits, and be paid for its labours; it was, therefore, to have a bonus of £5, or a sum of about that amount, for each emigrant it would prove to the satisfaction of Government that it had located in Canada. It was to have other profits. It was to be empowered to lend money to the district councils in Canada, to effect local improvements, and the interest of this money was to be a portion of its profits. All the emigrants were to be settled on the land in Canada; this would be bought in its rude state by the company, and resold at a profit, when it had improved it, and established upon it those "aids to location" enumerated further on. This bonus of £5 on each, emigrant would amount to £7,500,000, which, together with the £1,500,000 mentioned above, would absorb the £9,000,000.
As already stated, it was a marked characteristic of this systematic emigration, or colonization, that it was to be exclusively Catholic, and that a number of priests, proportioned to the number of emigrants, should be appointed to accompany them and settle down with them. This Mr. Godley held to be absolutely necessary. Before the Lords' Committee on Colonization he is asked: "Has any mode occurred to you by which a more compacted social organization might be given to emigration, carrying with it more of the characteristics and elements of improved civilization than at present exists?" He answers: "Yes. I have explained my views upon the subject at considerable length elsewhere. I think that the nucleus of an Irish Roman Catholic emigration must be ecclesiastical, I think they are debarred from going upon the land and settling socially, by the want of the ordinances of their church; I think that the first and most important element, in an Irish social settlement must be religious and ecclesiastical."[285] Again he is asked: "At the present moment, has it come within your knowledge, that the want of such spiritual care and assistance checks the progress of settlement among Irish emigrants, and, consequently, to a certain extent, discourages emigration?" "Certainly," Mr. Godley answers, "it prevents them from going upon the land all over America." "How does it," he is further asked, "prevent them from going upon the land?" "In this way," he replies, "they being too poor to take the priest with them to the wilderness, in order to partake of the ordinances of their church, and to enjoy spiritual advice and comfort, remain in the towns, where they are simply labourers, and are checked in going upon the land as rural settlers."[286] Question 1819: "How do you propose that the priests should be paid?" Answer: "By a grant from this country or from Ireland." Question 1820: "Do you mean simply the expense of their emigration, not as a permanent endowment in the colony?" Answer: "I never entered so exactly into the detail as to say in what manner I thought the endowment might be best effected, and, consequently, I do not consider myself as committed to any particular plan of endowment. The probability is, that the most effective way of endowing them would be, to a certain extent, in money, and to a certain extent by land in Canada; but that is a part of the plan which I did not consider necessary to draw out in detail." The following question and answer explains what Mr. Godley meant by "aids to location:"—Question 1848: "What is the practical mode in which you would set about the establishment of a colony?" Answer: "I would open the country by means of roads and bridges, build mills, endow a clergyman, and build a school. Those are the leading features of a social settlement to which I think a company, or any body that wanted to establish a settlement, ought to attend first."
The memorial to Lord John Russell, praying that the Government would give its sanction and support to Mr. Godley's scheme of colonization, was signed by one archbishop, four marquises, seven earls, three viscounts, thirteen barons, nine baronets, eighteen members of parliament, some honourables, and several deputy-lieutenants. The memorialists were, in all, eighty—that is, eighty of the leading peers, members of parliament, and landowners approached the First Minister, to beg that he would aid them in sending two millions of Irish Catholics to Canada, to reclaim the land in that colony. Everybody knows that the statement of Sir Robert Kane is accepted as a truth, that there are in Ireland four and a-half millions of barren acres, the greater portion of which would richly, and promptly, repay for their reclamation. Yet the Government Bill for beginning that reclamation was withdrawn by the Prime Minister, and no single voice was raised in favour of going on with it; moreover, he said his reason for withdrawing it was, the opposition which the House of Lords offered to it. Yes; they would have no reclamation of Irish lands, but they would submit to bear increased taxation in order to send the Celtic race by the million to delve in Canada!—yet, even for that it became the Irish people to be duly grateful, inasmuch as it was a decided improvement upon the older colonization scheme of "To h—— or Connaught."[287]
The colonization scheme met with little or no support in Ireland. It was suspected. It was regarded as a plan for getting rid of the Celt by wholesale. A Protestant gentleman, Mr. Thomas Mulock, thus comments on the memorial: "And is it come to this, O ye lords and gentlemen! representatives of the Irish party, with prospective adhesions after the Easter holidays from the vast majority of Irish Protestant proprietors,—do you avow yourselves to be in the position of landowners, who stand in no relation of aristocracy or leadership, government or guidance, succour or solace to millions of the people, who famish on the territorial possessions from which you derive your titles, your importance, your influence, your wealth. Has confiscation been mellowed into the legal semblance of undisputed succession, only to bring about a state of things which the most ruthless ravagers of nations never permanently perpetrated?"[288]
The memorial was extensively circulated. Amongst many others, one was sent to the Right Rev. Dr. Maginn, Coadjutor Bishop of Derry. He replied in terms scathing as they were indignant. The following is an extract from his letter:—"In sober earnestness, gentlemen, why send your circular to a Catholic bishop? Why have the bare-faced impudence to ask me to consent to the expatriation of millions of my co-religionists and fellow-countrymen? You, the hereditary oppressors of my race and my religion,—you, who reduced one of the noblest peoples under heaven to live in the most fertile island on earth on the worst species of a miserable exotic, which no humane man, having anything better, would constantly give to his swine or his horses;—you, who have made the most beautiful island under the sun a land of skulls, or of ghastly spectres;—you are anxious, I presume, to get a Catholic bishop to abet your wholesale system of extermination—to head in pontificals the convoy of your exiles, and thereby give the sanction of religion to your atrocious scheme. You never, gentlemen, laboured under a more egregious mistake than by imagining that we could give in our adhesion to your principles, or could have any, the least confidence, in anything proceeding from you. Is not the ex-officio clause in the Poor-law Bill your bantling, or that of your leader, Lord Stanley? Is not the quarter of an acre clause test for relief your creation? Were not the most conspicuous names on your committee the abettors of an amendment as iniquitous as it was selfish—viz., to remove the poor-rates from their own shoulders to that of their pauper tenantry? Are not they the same members who recently advocated, in the House of Commons, the continuation of the fag-end of the bloody penal code of the English statute book, by which our English brethren could be transported or hanged for professing the creed of their conscience, the most forward in this Catholic emigration plan? What good could we expect from such a Nazareth?"[289]
The Prime Minister did not take up the great colonization scheme. He said, in the House of Commons, on the 29th of April, that he declined, on the part of the Government, assuming the responsibility of providing for the absorption of the great excess of labour then existing in Ireland. "I deny," said Lord John, "on the part of the Government, the responsibility of completely, still less suddenly, resolving that question. What we can do, and what we, the Government, have endeavoured to do is, to mitigate present suffering."
The Government was of opinion that emigration, left to itself, would transfer the starving people to the United States and British America, as quickly as they could be provided for in those countries. This calculation turned out to be correct enough, as the following figures will show:—Emigration from Ireland in the year 1845 is set down at 74,969; it increased in 1846 to 105,955, although the Famine had not to the full extent turned the minds of the people to seek homes in the New World. The emigration of 1847 more than doubled that of 1846, being 215,444; ti fell in 1848 to 178,159, but in 1849 the emigration of 1847 was repeated, the emigrants of that year being 214,425, of which 2,219 were orphan girls from the Workhouses. The magnitude of the exodus was maintained in 1850, that year giving 209,054 voluntary exiles; but the emigration in 1851, which year closed the decade, quite outstripped that of any previous year, the figure in that year standing at 257,372.[290]