ABSTRACT
Unofficial enthusiasts were not so easily discouraged, and their imagination was captured by a scheme more grandiose by far than the scheme of Grey and Buller. Its sponsor was John Robert Godley, the future founder of Canterbury, though Wakefield also appears to have had a hand in it;2 and it was adopted in a memorial addressed by a group of Irish landowners to Lord John Russell. Emigration, the memorialists held, must be limited by nothing but the indisposition to emigrate. True, the demand for labour in the colonies and the inability of the Irish poor to pay for their passage must be taken into account; but that was exactly what the scheme proposed to do. Let public works in Canada be encouraged by loans to District Councils or guarantees of interest to British capitalists; let one-third of the cost of passage be defrayed by Government, the rest perhaps by a Company formed to carry out the scheme. The emigration moreover was to be no mere shovelling out of paupers. There was one institution only to which the Irish really appeared attached in their native land-the Roman Catholic Church. Let their priests be transplanted with them, to keep them together: for they must be kept together. 'We believe that, in order to plant any number of them happily in a new country, and in order to render that country attractive to them, their national sympathies and
aSSOcIatIOns, as well as their religion, must be carefully preserved and deliberately used.' Finally the memorialists proposed that a loan of £9,000,000 should be raised, and secured on an Irish property and income tax. With this assistance they hoped that a million and a half emigrants might be sent out under the scheme in the course of three or four years. I The idea, in short, was nothing less than to call a new Ireland into existence to redress the balance of the old.
