obtain still increased returns. If, however, the market be distant, he
must raise only those things that will bear carriage, and which from
their small yield command a high price, and thus is he limited in his
cultivation, and the more he is limited the more rapidly he exhausts
his land, the less is his power to obtain roads, to have association
with his fellow-men, to obtain books, to improve his mode of thought,
to make roads, or to purchase machinery. Such is the case even when he
is compelled to sell and buy in distant markets, but still worse is it
when, as in the case of the rent of the absentee, nothing is returned
to the land, for then production diminishes without a corresponding
diminution of the rent, and the poor cultivator is more and more
thrown upon the mercy of the land-owner or his agent, and becomes, as
we see to have been the case in Jamaica and India, practically a
slave. This state of things has in all countries been followed by a
diminution of population resulting from starvation or from
exportation; and hence it is that we see the destruction of life in
Ireland, India, and the West Indies, while from the two former vast
numbers are annually exported, many of them to perish in the new
countries to which they are driven. Out of 99,000 that left Ireland
for Canada in a single year, no less than 13,000 perished on
shipboard, and thousands died afterward of disease, starvation, and
neglect; and thus it is that we have the horrors of "the middle
passage" repeated in our day. It is the slave trade of the last
century reproduced on a grander scale and on a new theatre of action.

We are told of the principle of population that men increase faster
than food, and, for evidence that such must always be the case, are
pointed to the fact that when men are few in number they always
cultivate the rich soils, and then food is abundant, but as population
increases they are forced to resort to the poor soils, and then food