His great object was, he said, to create
employment, and to create it in the production of food, if possible.
Surely, says Mr. Scrope, if this can be created for the people at home,
it is much better, for a thousand reasons, than to attempt to find it
for them in America. "I cannot refrain," he writes, "from expressing
astonishment at the degree to which the almost inexhaustible resources
offered by the waste lands of Ireland for the production of employment
of the wretched and unwillingly idle labourers of that country, have
been overlooked and neglected, no less by statesmen than individual
proprietors."[255]
From whatever cause, Irish landowners did not, to any considerable
extent, take up, in earnest, the question of the reclamation of waste
lands. Roused by the pressure of the times and the impending poor-rate,
the majority of them looked, says Mr. Scrope, "for salvation" to other
means--to the eviction of their numerous tenantry--the clearing of their
estates from the seemingly superfluous population by emigration or
ejectment. "Yet," he continues, "nothing can be more true or more
capable of demonstration than the assertion that there is no real
redundancy of population in Ireland.
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