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CHAPTER XVIII.

EMIGRATION AND EMIGRANTS.

EMIGRATION. To treat fully, here, of emigration as a branch of social and political economy, would be to exceed the scope and purpose of a work like the present. But emigrants are so undervalued a class, so much lurking prejudice exists against emigra tion, its social and national merits are so often ignored, or so partially, so grudgingly admitted, that I trust the reader will allow me to preface this chapter with a few remarks expressive of an opinion that emigrants are the most valuable portion of the community which any over-crowded country can possess; and that emigration, as an old writer quaintly asserts, "is the very best affair of business in which any old country can engage." Emigrants and emigration have many friends-but they have many enemies, both secret and avowed.

'Tis said that not a few of the great and prosperous among us like to be surrounded, at a respectful distance, by the lowly and the meek their mansions are grander, their velvets softer, because of the hovels and rags. If every man had opera box, yacht, and flunkey, how many men would there be to whom these things would bring no pleasure! Poor people, poor neighbours, poor dependents, give zest to many a rich man's life-he "could better spare better men;" but these zests escape by emigration, and hence emigration has often the rich man's contumely and spite. Superfine "upper-crust" people, too, either born with the silver spoon, or having made the silver spoon, affect to look on emigration as a fit punishment for poverty, and will sneer at the emigrant as a sort of superior vagabond. Manufacturing millionaires, too, and the rich employing classes, whose wealth has been wrung out of the suicidal strife of too-abundant labour, and who fancy that the continuance of their prosperity rests on their power to recruit their labour-serfs from serried ranks of near preserves of paupers, naturally but blindly decry emigration that great highway whereby cheap labour eludes their

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fatal grip. Thousands of worthy people, too, vegetating through life in easy peace in the quiet spots they were born in, hold that defiant emigration to any new country is an unnatural offence, and that it is every man's duty to die where he first drew breath; while shallow anti-emigrationists liken emigration to a draining of the nation's life-blood, regard colonies as costly incumbrances, and utterly blind to the vast national benefits which emigration creates, are solicitous only to detect the minor evils which excess of emigration might entail.

Seeing, then, that emigration has all these enemies on the spot to attack, while her best friends, Emigrants, are not on the spot to defend; continually hearing as we do of "low Irish emigration," of "assisted emigration," of "pauper emigration," of "convict emigration;" recollecting, too, that the millions who emigrate, however bold, hardy, and enterprising they may be, are, nevertheless, for the most part, the poor, the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, it is not perhaps to be wondered at that emigrants have come to be looked on as a Pariah, or lower-caste order of our people; that emigration is regarded not as a noble career which calculating prudence and high enterprise might choose, but as a last resource which failure and misery accept; and that colonies were long legislated for, not as integral parts of the empire, immense sea-joined Devonshires and Yorkshires, but as remote Alsatian dependenciesrefuges for the bankrupt, the destitute, and the desperate, the beggar, the outlaw, and the thief.

But it is not, I think, in these lights that posterity will view colonies, emigrants, and emigration.

What is emigration? Emigration, I take it, is an inherent principle of animated nature, an instinctive desire common to man and to every living thing in creation to seek the gratification of certain implanted wants in those places, which reason in the one, instinct in the other, point out as best suited to supply such wants; and man's emigration, the periodical movements of animals, the migration of birds, the swarming of bees, all spring from this one common principle.

Emigration, indeed, was a necessity of human existence. If the first children of men, vegetable like, had remained stationary on the spot they were born in, had never wandered beyond their

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natal limits, never emigrated to "fresh fields and pastures new," the time must soon have come when their increased numbers would more than have consumed all the food which such limits could have been made to produce; when one of two things must have come to pass-either a stationary and accumulated population must have adopted some stringent Malthusian practice, and so have stopped their foodless increase, or have adopted cannibalism, and consumed it.

Happily, however, with man's desire to increase and multiply, an all-wise Providence coupled man's desire to seek space for his increase and multiplication to emigrate; and the glorious result of emigration is that instead of the human race being still confined to a handful of skin-clad shepherds tending their scanty flocks on Eastern hills, it is a thousand millions of sentient beings endowed with the divine light of reason, and enjoying the blessings of existence in every fair province of the earth from pole to pole.

The pages of Holy Writ, of ancient and modern history, teem with encouragements to emigration and illustrations of it. When the Lord said unto Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee; and I will make of thee a great nation, and bless thee, and make thy name great," Abraham departed, and he was an emigrant, planting a colony. Classic history's mightiest heroes, too, were many of them great emigrant dex who planted colonies. Carthage and the Grecian States sprang from emigration. The chief who led his followers from Gaul to Albion was an emigrant planting a colony, the colony of Ancient Britons; and if European emigration and the planting of colonies had stopped here, England might still have been inhabited by a handful of ragged savages worshipping the mistletoe and idol gods. But European emigration did not stop here-it continued to flow into Britain. The aboriginal British savages were destroyed by, or amalgamated with, successive warrioremigrant bands of Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; and thus mongrel emigration created what, step by step, has grown into the great Anglo-Saxon race of 1861.

But without some further and improved sort of emigration, leading to the creation and acquisition of new-world colonies,

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this mere creation of the English race would never, probably, have raised England to any much greater pitch of power and civilisation than she had been able to attain before she did commence an improved sort of emigration and the planting of newworld colonies say the pitch she had attained in the Elizabethan era, when, as we gather from Macaulay's lustrous page, half the kingdom was wild moor and waste, and the wolf and wild cat still prowled the forest; when the journey from London to Scotland was fuller far of peril than the journey now from London to New Zealand; when Manchester scarce counted 6000 people, and only a few poor fishermen dried their nets at Brighton; and when the Queen herself trod upon reeds, fastened her clothes with wooden skewers, and fed the dainty maids of honour on beef, salt-fish, and beer.

For we have to recollect that this little island of ours, barren in soil, bleak in climate, yielding but coarse food and raiment for its people, possessed nothing indigenous which it could exchange with richer countries for articles of comfort and luxury. England had no cotton or silk; no gold, silver, or precious stones; no tea, no coffee; no sugar, rice, or fragrant spices; no costly woods or useful gums; no healing drugs or Tyrian dyes; and no great store even of wool, flax, or timber.

But, like the bees, we went abroad for honey; we commenced an improved sort of emigration. We planted colonies in lands where nature had been more bountiful; sent back the raw riches of the earth, opened our coal-fields, and invoked the giant genius of steam, fashioned these raw materials into every conceivable object for man's use, comfort, and luxury, supplied ourselves, and sold the annual surplus to the world,-thus creating commerce, shipping, and manufactures; vastly improving their sister, agriculture, and raising this little Albion of ours from her poor estate of a rugged island of the German Ocean to be Queen of the Seas, and mistress of half the world.

The little band of Pilgrim Fathers, who, on the 6th of September, 1620, set sail in the good ship Mayflower, to seek a refuge and the right of worship in the then rugged wilderness of America, were the heroic heralds of a mighty movement, which, as by the wand of enchantment, has since changed that rugged wilderness into one of the greatest nations the world has

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ever seen. Since this period, England has been constantly throwing off her swarms, and sending forth hive after hive of earnest, enlightened, Christian communities. Continent and island, wilderness and jungle, forest and prairie, but a few years since the desolate haunts of the savage and of prowling and creeping things, are now alive with the busy hum of commerce, and echoing with the glad sound of the church-going bell. On that luxuriant plain which, but a few years since, revealed no trace of human kind, save the wreathing smoke from the wild man's solitary wigwam, we see flocks and herds and golden crops surrounding a busy city, teeming with civilised life. The clear waters of that noble river, for ages undisturbed by aught save the native's frail canoe, or the wild beasts which came at nightfall to lap their drink, are now ploughed by gaudy steamers, and thronged by fleets of tall merchantmen and rich argosies from the most distant regions of the earth. And we are winning these new worlds of ours, planting our banners over these new and fruitful southern lands, not as in days of old, by the blighting march of armies, by fire, sword, and desolation; but by the gentle force of peace, by the prowess of the good Knight Industry, by agriculture and commerce, by the plough and the loom; and there "is more glory to the hero in laying such foundations of a mighty State-though no trumpets resound with his victory, though no laurels may shadow his tomb-than in forcing the onward progress of his race over burning cities and hecatombs of men."

If asked, What fruits emigration has produced us—we point to our magnificent colonial empire, peopled by seven millions of our race, and stretching over an area quadruple the size of Europe-an empire won from the wilderness by emigrants and emigration, an empire which, in these its infant days, creates nearly half our trade and employs nearly half our shipping, which consumes millions sterling per annum of our manufactures, and which supplies us with millions sterling per annum of gold, wool, timber, and a thousand articles of raw produce in return articles necessary to the continued existence of half our manufactures, and essential to the well-being and prosperity, nay, to the actual feeding and subsistence of hundreds of thousands of our manufacturing population.