Alike in old and new countries there has been, during the last few years, a remarkable revival of interest in the long debated and apparently exhausted problems of emigration and colonization. Many important European states have shown by their official enquiries and reports, as well as by public discussion, that the attention of statesmen and publicists has been directed to the effects, both social and economic, likely to follow from the recent movements of population. On the other hand, the United States and our Australian and American colonies, looking at the same set of facts from an opposite stand-point, have been engaged in an examination of the influence which various classes of immigrants must necessarily exercise on their earlier inhabitants, and have even in some degree proposed to deal in a practical manner with the problem. It may not, therefore, be out of place to consider some of the questions thus brought into notice, the more so as Ireland is surely as deeply interested in the policy pursued towards immigrants by foreign nations as any other country.

Read Tuesday, 26th June, 1888