The debate on Tuesday night on Mr. O'Connor Power's large
proposals for an extensive scheme of Irish migration,—i.c., for removing the Irish peasants from the bad land in the west to better land elsewhere in Ireland which they are to be aided to reclaim,—seems to us to have disposed finally of the dream that any such scheme is feasible, or offers the slightest prospect of success. He proposed to spend three millions sterl- ing in buying half a million of acres of reclaimable land, and two millions more in draining and building, so as to render them habitable, which would provide farms of twenty acres each for 25,000 Irish peasants. Mr. Trevelyan showed that the cost of this operation would greatly exceed £5,000,000, while the pro- spect of ever getting the expenditure back again would be extremely bad ; whereas the same number of people could be established in comfort in Canada or the United States for a sum not greatly exceeding B6-25,000, about one-eighth of the sum which Mr. O'Connor Power demands for the far more risky opera- tion which he proposed. Mr. Trevelyan's speech seems to us to have proved to demonstration that emigration, and not migration within the island, is the true remedy for the extreme poverty of the West Coast. Mr. O'Connor Power's motion was rejected, in favour of Lord Lymington's recommendation of emigration, by 99 to 33; and then Lord Lymiugton's proposal was put, and negatived without a division, on the ground that, though it suggested the right remedy, it suggested it in an impracticable form.
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