He accordingly gets four acres more, and settles down as his brother did.

In this manner the holding is frittered away and subdivided among them.

For the first few years--that is, before their children rise--they may struggle tolerably well; but, at the expiration of twenty or twenty-five years, each brother finds himself with such a family as his little strip of land cannot adequately support, setting aside the claims of the landlord altogether; for rent in these cases is almost out of the question.
What, then, is the consequence?
Why, that here is to be found a population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen upon it--a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution under which it groans.
Such is the history of one class of emigrants in this unhappy land, of ours; and what small farmer, with such a destiny as that we have detailed staring him and his in the face, would not strain every nerve that he might fly to any country--rather than remain to encounter the frightful state of suffering which awaits him in this.
Such, then, is an illustration of the motives which prompt one class of emigrants to seek their fortune in other climes, while it is yet in their power to do so.

There is still a higher class, however, consisting of strong farmers possessed of some property and wealth, who, on looking around them, find that the mass of destitution which is so rapidly increasing in every direction must necessarily press upon them in time, and ultimately drag them down to its own level.

But even if the naked evils which pervade society among us were not capable of driving these independent yeomen to other lands, we can assure our legislators that what these circumstances, appalling as they are, may fail in accomplishing, the recent act for the extra relief of able-bodied paupers will complete--an act which, instead of being termed a Relief Act, ought to be called an act for the ruin of the country, and the confiscation of its property, both of which, if not repealed, it will ultimately accomplish.