AN OFFER FROM BUENOS AYRES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VII, Issue 413, 11 March 1881, Page 7

AN OFFER FROM BUENOS AYRES.

Mr. Calvo, formerly Argentine Chief Commissioner of Emigration in Europe, is now publishing in the Siglo. a series of most interesting papers on the great subject of the day, and, in one of them, has propounded a scheme for the importation and settlement here of 100,000 families from Ii eland ; and on this scheme we deem it our duty to comment briefly, lest the Government should be inclined to adopt, it. Mr. Calvo starts with the premise that the present unhappy condition of Ireland offers a favourable opportunity for laying before the emigrating classes of that country, or rather "before the British Government, the advantages this country is prepared to offer the former, and, assuming the consent of both, propounds an arrangement by which the British Government is to land at Bahia Blanca or Patagonea as many thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of the Queen's Irish subjects as it can ship or carry, the Argentine Government giving to each son of Erin, as he lands, a free farm, oa which he is to live and toil, and wax fat, and grow rich for the rest of his natural life. This is, in few words, Mr. Calvo's scheme, and we are far from saying that it would be a bad one, either for those that gave or those that took, were it hased on accurate premises, which, unfortunately, it is not We who live in this favored land may know that it would be the greatest of blessings, personally, to the thousands of small tenant farmers in Ireland if they could be induced to change their present precarious lot for the prospects that a free gift of the fertile soil of this great and rising country would open to them, and that, in a few years, they would probably be more prosperous here than generations could make them or their descendants, even if their hopes were fulfilled to-morrow and they became proprietors in fee of their little holdings ; but to convince them of this would take time and organisation, and an expenditure of money which the Argentine Government would not just now be justified in facing. The British Government would be the very worst emigration agent possible where the Irish people are concerned, at least during the present crisis. When it is over, one way or the other, we are far from believing that an organised effort to lay the advantages of this country before the emigrating classes in Ireland might not meet with a considerable measure of success. There is a grand nucleus of brilliantly successful Irishmen here as a point of attraction and visible proof of what industry can achieve in this fertile land ; but South America is as yet much of a " terra incognita " in Ireland, indeed in all Europe, except to the few of each nation who have relatives here, or trading relations with it, and it will require a systematic and sustained crusade to turn the mass of Irish and English emigrants from their beaten track to the United States and British colonies. With time and perseverance such a crusade might succeed , but if peasant proprietorship become a fact in Ireland, as we firmly believe it shortly will, emigration from that country to any part of the world will speedily dwindle away, arid finally cease altogether. — Southern Oroti,

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