CHAPTER I.
Table of Contents
Emigrants and Immigration.
Very surprising it seems to assert that the Mother Country knows very little about the finest colony which she possessesand that an enlightened people emigrate from sober, speculative England, sedate and calculating Scotland, and trusting, unreflective Ireland, absolutely and wholly ignorant of the total change of life to which they must necessarily submit in their adopted home.
I recollect an old story, that an old gunner, in an old-fashioned, three-cornered cocked hat, who was my favourite playfellow as a child, used to tell about the way in which recruits were obtained for the Royal Artillery.
The recruiting sergeant was in those days dressed much finer than any field-marshal of this degenerate, railway era; in fact, the Horse Guards always turned out to the sergeant-major of the Royal Military Academy of Woolwich, when that functionary went periodically to the Golden Cross, Charing Cross, to receive and escort the young gentlemen cadets from Marlow College, who were abandoning the red coat and drill of the foot-soldier to become neophytes in the art and mystery of great gunnery and sapping.
"The way they recruited was thus," said the bombadier. "The gallant sergeant, bedizened in copper lace from the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, and with a swagger which no modern drum-major has ever presumed to attempt, addressed a crowd of country bumpkins.
"'Don't listen to those gentlemen in red; their sarvice is one which no man who has brains will ever think offooting it over the univarsal world; they have usually been called by us the flatfoots. They uses the musquet only, and have hands like feet, and feet like fireshovels.
"'Mind me, gentlemen, the royal regiment of the Royal Artillery is a sarvice which no gentleman need be ashamed of.
"'We fights with real powder and ball, the flatfoots fights with bird-shot. We knows the perry-ferry of the circumference of a round shot. Did you ever see a mortar? Did you ever see a shell? I will answer for it you never did, except the poticary's mortar, and the shell that mortar so often renders necessary.
"'Now, gentlemen, at the imperial city of Woolwich, in the Royal Arsenal, you may, if you join the Royal Artillery, you may see shells in earnest. Did you ever see a balloon? Yes! Then the shells there are bigger than balloons, and are the largest hollow shot ever madethe French has nothing like them.
"'And the way we uses them! We fires them out of the mortars into the enemy's towns, and stuffs them full of red sogers. Well, they bursts, and out comes the flatfoots, opens the gates, and lets the Royal Artillery in; and then every man fills his sack with silver, and gold, and precious stones, after a leetle scrimmaging.
"'Come along with me, my boys, and every one of you shall have a coat like mine, which was made out of the plunder; and you shall have a horse to ride, and a carriage behind it; and you shall see the glorious city of Woolwich, where the streets are paved with penny loaves, and drink is to be had for asking.'"
So it is with nine-tenths of the emigrants to Canada in these enlightened days; so it is with the emigrants from old England, and from troubled Ireland, to the free and astonishing Union of the States of America and Texas, that conjoint luminary of the new go-ahead world of the West.
Dissatisfied with home, with visionary ideas of El Dorados, or starving amidst plenty, the poorer classes obtain no correct information. Beset generally with agents of companies, with agents of private enterprise, with reckless adventurers, with ignorant priests, or missionaries of the lowest stamp, with political agitators, and with miserable traitors to the land of their birth and breeding, the poor emigrant starts from the interior, where his ideas have never expanded beyond the weaver's loom or factory labour, the plough or the spade, the hod, the plane, or the trowel, and hastens with his wife and children to the nearest sea-port.
There he finds no friend to receive and guide him, but rapacious agents ready to take every advantage of his ignorance, with an eye to his scanty purse. A host of captains, mates, and sailors, eager to make up so many heads for the voyage, pack them aboard like sheep, and cross the Atlantic, either to New York or to Quebec, just as they have been able to entice a cargo to either port. Then come the horrors of a long voyage and short provisions, and high prices for stale salt junk and biscuit; and, at the end, if illness has been on board, the quarantine, that most dreadful visitation of allfor hope deferred maketh the heart sick.
From the first discovery of America, there has been a tendency to exaggeration about the resources and capabilities of that countrya magniloquence on its natural productions, which can be best exemplified by referring the reader to the fac-simile of the one in Sir Walter Raleigh's work on Guiana,[1] now in the British Museum. Shakespeare had, no doubt, read Raleigh's fanciful description of "the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders," &c.; for he was thirty-four years of age when this print was published, only seventeen years before his death.
So expansive a mind as Raleigh's undoubtedly was, was not free from that universal credulity which still reigns in the breasts of all men respecting matters with which they are not personally acquainted; and the glowing descriptions of Columbus and his followers respecting the rich Cathay and the Spice Islands of the Indies have had so permanent a hold upon the imagination, that even the best educated amongst us have, in their youth, galloped over Pampas, in search of visionary Uspallatas. Nor is it yet quite clear that the golden city of El Dorado is wholly fabulous, the region in which it was said to exist not having yet been penetrated by Science; but it soon will be, for a steamboat is to ply up the Maranon, and Peru and Europe are to be brought in contact, although the voyage down that mighty flood has hitherto been a labour of several months.
The poor emigrant, for we must return to him, lands at New York. Sharks beset him in every direction, boarding-houses and grogshops open their doors, and he is frequently obliged, from the loss of all his hard-earned money, to work out his existence either in that exclusively mercantile emporium, or to labour on any canal or railroad to which his kind new friends may think proper, or most advantageous to themselves, to send him. If he escapes all these snares for the unwary, the chances are that, fancying himself now as great a man as the Duke of Leinster, O'Connell, the Lord Mayor of London, or the Provost of Edinburgh, free and unshackled, gloriously free, he becomes entangled with a host of land-jobbers, and walks off to the weary West, there to encounter a life of unremitting toil in the solitary forests, with an occasional visit from the ague, or the milk-fever, which so debilitates his frame, that, during the remainder of his wretched existence, he can expect but little enjoyment of the manorial rights appendant to a hundred acres of wild land.
