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then invented the cotton-gin; and the export | ern agricultural State except Wisconsin. It of cotton, in 1793 less than five hundred is also nearly as large as in California, a goldthousand pounds, trebled in 1794, increased seeking community from the world at large. to six millions in 1795, reached eighteen mil- 4. It principally consists of Irish, Germans, lions in 1800, two hundred and eighty mil- and English.* lions in 1830, and nine hundred and twentyseven millions in 1850. African bondage became profitable. The planters of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and the Carolinas bear the sin before the world; but Liverpool, Lowell, Manchester, and New York furnished the money which prolongs and extends the system.

In spite of these influences so favorable to slavery, the foreign immigration is gradually affecting the balance of power in the Federation. In 1800 the total population of the slave States was 48 per cent. of that of the Union, and their representation was 45 per cent. of the House. In 1830 they had but 45 per cent. of the population, and 41 per cent. of the representation; and in 1850 but 41 per cent. of the former, and 39 per cent. of the latter. It requires no prophet to foresee that the same disturbing causes will continue as long as the peasants and artisans of Europe can command cheap homes, high wages and an improved social position in the New World as easily as they now do. The census enables us to follow their track across the Republic, and to see in what communities they rest. The results are curious and not altogether expected.

1. It appears that the immigration rests almost entirely in the free States. Of the 2,200,000 foreigners resident in the Union, only 305,000 are in the slave States; and of these 127,000 are in the comparatively northern corn-growing States of Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri, and 66,000 in the commercial State of Louisiana.

2. It travels principally due west in a belt reaching from 36° to 37° N. to 43° or 44° N., including the central and southern parts of New England, the middle and north-western States, Maryland and Delaware, and the central and northern part of Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri. The climate and productions of this country are similar to those of Europe; the general ratio of health and average of life is higher, notwithstanding the great floating European population, and the name of laborer is not degraded by a comparison with slaves.

Of the English nearly five-eighths are to be found in the Atlantic free States, about onethird in the States of the north-west, and nearly all the residue in the northern slave States.

Three-fourths of the Irish stay in New England and the middle States, (principally in Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania,) where the commercial and manufacturing interests are seated; and they are found in the South and West only where there are great public works in construction. They change their soil and their allegiance, but keep their nature intact. Unwilling in the New, as in the Old World, to guide their own destinies, they stay where another race furnishes food for their mouths, and labor for their hands, and takes to itself the substantial fruits of their industry. One love, however, is entirely weeded from their hearts. Their experience with the impoverishing potato-patch seems to have given them a distaste for agriculture; and in a country where there is plenty of land and a sure harvest, they avoid almost entirely the pursuits to which they cling so tenaciously in Europe. Their numbers did not in 1850 reach a million,-not two thirds of the decrease in the Irish population during the last ten years.

The Germans are more energetic, or rather, bring their energy to a better account. More than half their number are spread over the north-western States, Missouri and Kentucky, and more than one-third in New York and Pennsylvania. They stay, indeed, in the towns in great numbers, devoting themselves to mechanical arts and to trades; but a large proportion, also, if the census speaks truly, are to be found in the agricultural districts, where they fell the forest and turn up the prairie for themselves. Some years ago we remember to have seen a colony of German emigrants landed on the unfinished pier of an unbuilt city in Wisconsin. The pier has doubtless since been completed, and the city has its thousands: but then, a few driven piles and a quantity of scattered lumber marked the place of the former, and rectangular streets strewn with fresh-felled timber, stretching. into a primeval forest, showed

3. Less than one-third of the total immigration has entered the Lake Country and the Valley of the Mississippi. The proportion of foreign population in New York and * Their respective numbers in 1850 were-Engin Massachusetts is greater than in any west-lish, 278,625; Irish, 961,719; German, 573,225.

where the latter was to be. The emigrants | the compliment. Virginia crosses to Kenwere bundled out upon the pier, and their tucky, and Kentucky pushes over into Illinois. boxes, chests, willow-fans for winnowing Yet the whole migration appears to be gowheat by hand, spinning-wheels and primi- verned by fixed laws, producing ascertainable tive spades, scythes, and ploughs were tum results. bled after them. The poor women sat upon the boxes in the hot sun (it was in August) and cried at the desolate appearance of this the gate to their Paradise, and the men tried in their rough way to comfort them. We leaned upon the "guard," looking at them as the boat steamed up Lake Michigan, and admired the simplicity which could bring their miserable utensils to such a country. Long before this the men have chased away the young grouse with American ploughs, and have fattened their cattle on the long grass of the prairie, and the women, putting away the spinning-wheels as relics of a bygone existence, sit in the summer evening under the honeysuckle and bignonia, which twist themselves over the porch, and sing to their children of the Vaterland without a sigh of regret.

The Valley of the Mississippi and the Upper Lake Country has not only gained in an unexampled manner, but has been almost created within the last half century. Where, in 1800, there were less than 400,000 persons clustered around the rude forts that protected them from the Indians, with only 7 per cent. of the representation in Congress, there are now nearly ten millions cultivating 53,000,000 acres of improved land, and represented by 42 per cent. of the House. If the European emigration has remained in the Atlantic States, the inquiry naturally arises, Whence comes this Western population?

The oracle of the census again responds. All the while there has been a native emigration twice as great as the foreign. Washington Irving's pleasant sketch of the Yankee seems to be literally true, a discontented being, unwilling to stay quietly in the home of his birth, and seeking an unknown better in some new sphere. Just when he begins to grasp it,-when the "stumps" are uprooted and the corn grows plentifully, when his finished barns are filled, and his log cabin takes to itself some look of comfort, he sells his "improvements" at a profit, shoulders his axe, harnesses his horse to a covered cart, into which he packs his wife and a staircase of children, and marches to some spot still farther west, where he may begin anew. Thus the whole country is in motion; Massachusetts removes to Maine, and Maine to Massachusetts; New York visits Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania returns

1. In the free States the general movement is due west,-from New York, for instance, to Michigan and Wisconsin, and from Pennsylvania to Ohio. From Maine and New Hampshire it goes principally to Massachusetts, from the other New England States more to New York than elsewhere; but natives of all are found in the free northwest States in large numbers. The middle States are also represented there by an aggregate of 758,020, in addition to which they interchange very extensively with each other; the people of the small States, particularly, going to the great cities of their neighbors. The emigration from the northern Atlantic States into the six north-western States amounts to nearly 1,200,000. And so strong is this passion for motion, that the West itself supplies a population to the still farther West. Ohio sends 215,000 to the three States beyond her; Indiana retains 120,000 from Ohio, but sends on 50,000 of her own; Illinois takes 95,000 from Ohio and Indiana, and gives 7,000 to young Iowa; and that State, though not twenty years redeemed from the Indians, gains nearly 60,000 by the restlessness of the three, and, in its turn, breaks over the too feeble barriers of the Rocky Mountains to supply Utah and Oregon with 1,200 natives of Iowa.

2. The native emigration from their central slave States follows the same general law of a due westerly movement: but whether governed by the wish to escape from slavery, or by what other motive, it takes also a partial north-west direction into the free States.

Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, furnish 360,000 of the native population of the north-west.

3. The movement in the planting States has been mostly within themselves, taking a south-westerly and westerly direction from the older lands of South Carolina and Georgia, to the uplands of Alabama and Mississippi. The emigration from South Carolina alone is nearly 68 per cent. of the white population remaining within her borders.

4. The American-born population of Texas comes principally from the slave States, that of California from the free States, and that of the Territories more from the free than from the slave.

5. It appears from a study of the course

of both emigrations, that they mainly benefit the belt of country above described. New England loses nearly 400,000 of native population; but the foreign elements reduce the actual loss to 92,000. The middle States lose 600,000 of native population, but have so large a foreign additional, that the balance-sheet shows a gain of nearly 414,000. The central slave States lose 600,000 natives; the foreign emigration reduces their actual loss to 400,000. The planting States and Texas gain 300,000, of which nearly 200,000 are native. The north-west gains 1,900,000, of which 1,330,000 are native.*

the American continent. We are not sure that the honest clergymen of the land of the Puritans have not been found guilty of a profound policy in this. The child of the English or Scotch machinist in Massachusetts, of the German or Irish laborer, of the French or Italian artisan, in New York or Philadelphia, learns with the language and the institutions, the history which tells him the greatness of his new country; and, forgetting that he ever had another, he feels, with a pride that even Lord Palmerston might envy, "civis Romanus sum." If the first generation is never quite denationalized, the second is transformed by this process into very good Yankees. The fathers, too, soon get a little property, (for there is plenty of labor and little pauperism,) and thenceforth are identified with the stability of their new country; and by the time they become citizens, they have some just sense of the dignity they acquire, and of the responsibility it entails.

The same fact removes all apprehension of a disproportionate increase of Papal power in America. The Roman Catholic population being so completely identified with the older States, and impregnated with the spirit of their institutions, any pernicious influence from that quarter will be impossible. We hear often of the power of Jesuitism in America, and of the spread of Catholicism in the Valley of the Mississippi; but the facts in the census indicate no such thing. We are assured by those best able to judge, that so far from fearing the undue influence of the Romish Church, its conservative influence over the emigrants within its pale is regard

It is apparent that the political influence of the emigration is greatly exaggerated. If three or four hundred thousand uneducated peasants, unused to govern their own affairs, and much less acquainted with affairs of state, were annually transferred to the United States, and placed in communities by themselves, apart from the influence of more intelligent minds; left without schools, cultivation, or capital, to raise themselves as best they could, and admitted nevertheless to the dignity of citizenship, and to a share in administration, it would be irrational not to fear the result. But we see a process quite the reverse going on. These ignorant beings-ignorant, indeed, some of them are, and thickheaded and obstinate-are taken by the hand on arrival, and sent, not into the forest, but into a more thickly populated country than the one they left, with towns as large as any in Europe except the two capitals, with schools better than any of the same grade here, maintained at the public expense, with work enough for everybody, skilful and unskilful, and with better educated|ed persons than themselves to tell them what to do. They labor constantly with Americans, their children sit daily side by side with American children, reading from the same books, playing the same games, and learning to think the same thoughts. Mr. Tremenheere, in his excellent work, complains that all history in the public schools is ignored except that of the Republic, and gives us a list of twenty-one questions prepared for the examination of candidates for admission to the High School of Lowell, all of which refer only to events connected with

To reach these results, we have in each case ascertained the total number of natives from the particular section resident in the Union, and from that have deducted the total free native population residing in that section, or vice versâ; the result shows the loss or gain by emigration.

with favor. The Americans have a sufficient protection against the inroads of any sacerdotal despotism in their healthy English-born institutions, in the spirit of free inquiry which they have inherited from this country, and, above all, in their free schools, at which four millions are educated-onefifth of the free population.

The schools of the States have been made patent to English eyes during the contest concerning the various educational systems proposed for adoption here, and they certainly seem to answer the demands of a state

There are in the Union 36,011 churches, of all denominations, affording accommodation for 13,849,896 persons, of which only 1,112 are Roman Catholic, with accommodations for 620,950. In the lake country and Valley of the Mississippi, out of 13,661 churches, accommodating 4,891,002 persons, only 551 are Roman Catholic, accommodating 276,291.

of society bearing little resemblance to this. I influence still draws down the chins of their Indeed, in all the comparisons between the descendants,-about the time that they retwo countries, the fact of the great social dif- enacted the Mosaic code, penalties and all, ference is lost sight of. The similarity of with marginal references to chapter and political institutions, from the municipal par- verse, they partitioned the public land into ishes to the national legislatures, the com- parishes, on the English system, and asmunity of language, literature, and of ances- signed a part to the commonage, a part to try, so far as the Americans can get a tomb- the church, and a part to the schools. In stone and parish register acquaintance with process of time the common land has genetheir ancestors in England, the common rally ceased to be pasturage, and is, in many elements of wealth,-the resemblance, and, places, planted with trees, and made into in the main, identity of pursuits, are pictured public walks; the Church fields have disapglowingly by after-dinner orators, when the peared with the State organization; and the wine has mellowed the heart. Long may portion assigned to the schools has been abboth nations remember these things! And sorbed in the settlement of the country, and far distant may the day be when the difficul- exchanged for the right of general taxation, ties arise which philosophy teaches us they engender. But there is another side of the picture, less dwelt upon, and equally true, the vast social gap between an old country, with a cultivated artificial society, founded on great landed possessions, and a new country with no aristocracy, unless we give that name to the feeble remnant of colonial families overshadowed by recent wealth, or to the expiring gentility of the "Southern Chivalry." The British merchant labors, accumulates, buys land, is made a peer in the second generation, and is identified thence forth less with the town than with the country. The American merchant accumulates, invests in stocks and city lots, perhaps becomes a member of Congress, dies, and leaves his property to his children in even portions. In a generation or two it is scattered, and his poor descendants begin to climb the ladder anew. The inhabitants of no neat rural village point with pride to his well-stocked parks and wooded drives. He may have a cottage on Staten Island, the banks of the Hudson, the Delaware or the Schuylkill, or he may amuse himself with dillettante farming in Dorchester. But the non-producing landed proprietor, identified for generations with the soil, is unknown in America. The "people," owning each his little farm, or his house and garden, take the management of their own affairs into their own hands.

The public schools are the legitimate offspring of the social status, and return to it no small share of the stability which it enjoys. They were established in New England, at the settlement of the country, for the education of the children and the conversion of the Indians. About the time that the wearers of black doublets and steeplecrowned hats, who fled from oppression here to establish a Calvinistic despotism, whose

which right, as the sum to be raised is determined each year by each town for itself, and as suffrage is nearly universal, means the right of the poor to educate their children as they see fit at the expense of the taxpayers. The system has been extended from New England more or less through the free States, and works to the satisfaction even of the property-holders, who must be sometimes heavily mulcted by it. Mr. Tremenheere, for instance, tells us, that in a town near Boston, "the whole real property of which is valued at only 500,000 dollars, not less than 17,000 dollars were expended last year in the erection of five new school-houses, besides the ordinary expenses of maintaining their three grammar and two primary schools." Boston pays $15.42 per head for the children educated in her schools, (free for all without charge;) New York, $10.62; St. Louis on the Mississippi, $9.50; and Cincinnati on the Ohio, $6.37. These taxes are cheerfully submitted to by the propertyholders, who require no argument to be convinced that without education universal suffrage would be destructive to political liberty, to social virtue, and to property, on which both must lean. They feel that the schools are essential even for the native children with American homes, and doubly so for the foreigners, sometimes with worse than no home at all.

Thus, the moment the emigrant arrives and is settled, he and his children are cared for. He finds persons on the pier waiting to employ him, and he pockets at once his four shillings a day; or if he be ill, there is a hospital to receive him, where skilful surgeons and kind nurses minister to his wants. Schools say to his children," Come to us and be taught" and they go. It was found some years since, in a manufacturing town of Massachusetts, with a population nearly one

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write are in Massachusetts, and have attained a degree of excellence beyond those in other States. But the West will not be long behind the East in this respect. Mr. Tremenheere's work, although pretending to be no more than a sketch, gives an excellent picture of the working of the system throughout the Northern States, accompanied by the

of conservative tendencies. If we do not agree with him in all his conclusions, he himself furnishes us with reasons for differing. We gather from him that the schools of Pennsylvania and New York are inferior to those of New England, and that the average attendance is decidedly less. But it also appears that those who have charge of them are alive to the deficiency, and are using every means to repair it. We close our remarks on this subject with a short extract concerning the schools of Connecticut:

third of which was Irish, that of about 3000 children between the ages of three and sixteen, only nineteen were not attending school somewhere, and that sixteen of the nineteen stayed away because they had no good clothes; clothes were given, and the nonattendants reduced to three. The proportion throughout the Union is not as large as this; but yet large enough to change the charac-impressions it created on an intelligent mind ter of the whole foreign population. There is no greater mistake than that the characters of nations and races are unchangeable: leading minds mould the popular will to their pleasure. Catholic England under Henry VII. became Protestant England under Henry VIII. The freedom of Arragon died under the heel of the Inquisition. Louis XIV. troubled but once in his reign by the spirit of a free parliament. Can there be a greater contrast than between the ages of Elizabeth and Cromwell? or of Milton and Congreve? William III. made the English noblemen Dutchmen; George IV. beau-Brummelized society; and the present Court of England has set an example of purer and more refined manners. In the same way the character and purposes of the emigrants are changed. They are fashioned by the influences which surround them, and in the second generation become completely identified with the country of their adoption.

was

Mr. Tremenheere objects that no provision is made for religious education. In the United States such a provision would be the sacrifice of the system. The children of a million of Irish Roman Catholics attend the public schools and strive for the honors they give; the clergy of that denomination are placed by popular suffrage on the committees chosen to superintend the schools and prescribe the course of education; only on the implied understanding that the religious education shall be left to other hands. We cannot believe, in spite of Mr. Tremenheere's fear to the contrary, that the community which takes such care of the secular education, which provides one grade of schools for the infants, another for those who have crossed the Rubicon of knowledge and are battling with its elements, another yet higher for those who are preparing for the ordinary duties of life in the humbler middle classes, and one still beyond, fitted with libraries of elementary books and with scientific apparatus, where the studies of the Universities even may be pursued by the humblest child, free of cost, would make no provision elsewhere for religious instruction. It is just to add, that the schools we have in view as we VOL. XXXIII. NO. I.

would be also greatly struck with the very high Any one from England visiting those schools social position, considering the nature of their employment, of the teachers, male and female; he will observe with pleasure their polite and courteous bearing, of such importance as an example of good manners to the children; he will admire the complete order, quiet, and regularity with which the whole system of instruction is conducted, by the exercise of mild, temperate, and, generally speaking, judicious authority; and he will perceive how great an amount of elementary secular instruction is given to those who stay a sufficient length of time to derive the full benefit of the opportunities of improvement there afforded. And I must confess that he will be likely to feel it as a just subject of reproach to his own country, that her very tenderness and zeal in the cause of religious truth, her very apprehension lest in her desire to attain an acknowledged good she may be betrayed into a step fraught with evil-or, to descend to lower ground, her religious jealousies and animosities-should interpose to keep all education, both secular and religious, from the at a time too when secular education is more than minds of tens of thousands of our fellow-citizens, ever needed as a means of temporal prosperity and advancement, and when socialism and a vast and dangerous flood of " revolutionary literature" of the worst kind is occupying the ground left bare for its reception by the absence of all culture, secular or religious. How long, it may be well paralyzed by sectarian jealousies? and to what asked, is the government of this country to be further extent are the very foundations of religious truth and social order to be undermined, while the dispute rages as to the best method of preserving them? (Pp. 57, 58, 59.)

The provisions for the mental health of the emigrant are rivalled by those made for

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