the rich grew richer and stronger. Ireland, too, contributed largely
to the same result. As the Act of Union gradually closed her factories
and drove her people to cultivation as the sole means of supporting
life, they found themselves, like the Italians of olden time, forced
to emigrate to the place where taxes were distributed, in the hope of
obtaining wages, and their competition threw the English labourer
still more in the hands of the capitalist. From year to year the small
proprietor was seen to pass into the condition of a day-labourer, and
the small employing mechanic or tradesman to pass into a receiver of
wages, and thus did the whole people tend more and more to become
divided into two great classes, separated from each other by an
impassable gulf, the very rich and the very poor, the master and the
slave.

As England became more and more flooded with the wretched people of
the sister island, driven from home in search of employment, the
wealthy found it more and more easy to accomplish "the great works"
for which, as the London _Times_ inform us, the country is indebted to
the "cheap labour of Ireland," and the greater the influx of this
labour the more rapid was the decline in the power of both Ireland and
Britain to furnish a market for the products of the manufacturing,
labour of England. Hence arose, of course, a necessity for looking
abroad for new markets to take the place of those before obtained at
home, and thus cheap labour, a _consequence_ of the system, became in
its turn a _cause_ of new efforts at dispensing with and further
cheapening labour. As the Irishman could no longer buy, it became
necessary that the Hindoo should be driven from his own market. As the
Highlander was expelled, it became more and more necessary to
underwork the spinners and weavers of China. As the Bengalese now
become impoverished, there arises a necessity for filling the Punjab,