One of the most melancholy scenes to be witnessed
on the face of the earth, is the departure of a body of emigrants from their native
land. The deep grief felt by them at having to rend asunder old associations
and leave the land that they themselves and their fathers have been taught by
patriotic feeling to regard as sacred, has been expressed with great feeling in
Goldsmith’s Deserted Village. And in some of the most pathetic national songs
of Ireland and Scotland.
The poor emigrants have to leave their relations
and friends. And the fields in which they have played and worked from infancy. To
tempt fortune far across the sea and live as strangers in a stranger land. They
are generally very ignorant, and their ignorance makes them invest the unknown’s
country to which they are going which my -- serious horrors. Their misery is,
if possible. Intensified when they find themselves on the crowded emigrant
ship, home-sick and sea sick at once, and they lament that hour in which they
were induced to leave their home and trust themselves to the mercy of wind and wave.
Yet the pain of leave-taking and the terrors of the
voyage are, after all, but temporary evils, which may lead the way to permanent
happiness. When the British emigrant land is Australia or Canada, he finds
himself among surroundings, not so very unlike what he was unused to in the old
country. The Englishman looks in vain for the peaceful aspect of shady lanes
land hedgerows. And the Scotchman misses the moors and purple mountains that
are so dear to him. But they hear the familiar English tongue spoken, are
governed by English laws, and see the British flag waving over ships and
fortresses in their new home.
New friends supply the place of the old, and the
chief difference in their lot is that, whereas in England they labored hard for
a miserable pittance, and sometimes prayed for labor in vain, they are now in a
country where labor is so well paid, that everyone who is willing to work can
earn enough to support in comfort himself and his family. In course of time,
hard work, intelligence, and sobriety raise to affluence man of the emigrants
who, if they had remained in their own country, would not improbably after many
years of labor have ended their lives in the workhouse. Thus the poor man, who
finds a difficulty in maintaining himself at home, has every prospect of
bettering his condition by emigration.
At the same time emigrations, by diminishing the
superabundant number of the laboring population in England, tends to raise the
wages of the laborers left behind So that emigrations may be regarded as a
blessing to the country which sends out the emigrants. As well as the emigrants
themselves. It is also an advantages to the colony to which the emigrants go, as
new countries are almost always in want of labor of develop their natural resources.