fact, that, as the population of the different nations has increased, the necessity of these wanderings has diminished. I speak this advisedly, and in defiance of the information, or, I would rather say, the more formidable ignorance, of all the migration committees upon earth. I do not mean to say, but that many soul-stirring occasions, many powerful impulses, still may, and certainly will, carry numbers from every country to distant climes, even "to the farthest verge of the green earth;" or that such impulses may not be commissioned to effect some peculiar and important purposes of Divine Providence; or that there are not circumstances which demand such ejections on a principle of policy and humanity; but I deny, in behalf of a highly fertile, but imperfectly cultivated country,— I deny, in behalf of those feelings which endear to a grateful people their native seats and nearest connexions, I deny, in the name of the strength and majesty of the empire-and, as I trust I shall make manifest, in that of truth itself, that the wholesale deportations, now contemplated, are necessary-that they are otherwise than unnatural, impolitic, and cruel. On these consequences I shall not dwell at present, but shall merely add, that if we follow the dictates of nature, and take with us the lights of human history, we shall doubtless arrive at safe conclusions. We shall find, that the main instruments in these colonizing migrations were barbarism and oppression; their periods those "times of ignorance which God winked at," and rendered subservient to his benevolent purposes: those purposes accomplished, that veil of ignorance which seemed as effectually to conceal the

inexhaustible bounties of Providence from their benighted eyes, as it does from those of our political economists, was drawn aside, and the bosom of Nature, in all its loveliness and sufficiency, was bared to all her children. It has been already said, and indeed often repeated, that, as human beings have increased, their condition has been ameliorated; it must, however, be added, that, under more auspicious circumstances, the ties of kindred and social affection, and of attachment to country, so dear to all generous minds, have become strengthened and rooted in the very fibres of the heart. To tear them thence would too often be to leave an aching void which no after scenes of life could fill, and least of all those most of them would have to encounter. But in the divine economy, in these periods there are no such expedients dictated; Providence acts not by a system of cruel contrarieties; the desire of expatriation (excepting under perverse mismanagement), and its necessity, cease together; while the feelings of patriotism, fed by all the charities of life, and which it ought to be the care of all governments to cherish, rise in the deepest hostility to the proposition, and identify it with a penal infliction, in shame and suffering only short of ignominious death.

To apply the preceding remarks to the subject before us. When Europe, by far the most densely peopled, though perhaps the least fertile quarter of the globe, had probably not a twentieth part of its present inhabitants, we find them (at least in those parts which were the scantiest of people) in perpetual motion and fluctuation. But now that its numbers, in its confined territory, amount to so many scores of

any

millions, how few, comparatively speaking, desert their country? Meantime that they even now occupy, or adequately cultivate its surface, none will be found to assert. Malte-Brun intimates that, managed as at present, its soil would afford food enough for a thousand millions of inhabitants'; a calculation far within I have ever seen, which take for their basis agricultural data. How many additional millions this kingdom would sustain, not with diminished, nor yet with stationary comforts and accommodations merely, but with as large an accession to their plenty and prosperity as to their numbers, I shall not again inquire. In the mean time, the idea of sending numbers of our fellow-subjects to distant regions, in search of a precarious bread, is nothing less than a vestige of that ignorant barbarism, which the principle I am opposing is making a strong, but, I trust, a last and ineffectual effort to perpetuate: an expedient which has been often connected with injustice and violence, and which, in its very nature, must ultimately fail, when apparently the most necessary. Can it therefore be resorted to consistently with the dictates of sound policy, or reconciled with the permanent designs of an eternal Providence?

(3.) But if the scheme of thus transporting a certain number of its inhabitants is, in itself, revolting to us, the plan proposed by which it is to be put into execution, and the principle of determining those on whom the lot of being cast out of the country is to fall, heighten our feelings of hostility to it. Though no assistance whatsoever is to be afforded to such

'Malte-Brun, book xcv. p. 87.

whom a very little capital would elevate into a state of comfortable industry at home, adding permanently to the resources of the country, and which, as expended here, could not finally, no, nor presently, be lost; yet loans, it seems, are to be offered to such as will go out of the kingdom, which in many cases will be inevitably sacrificed, as well as themselves. But who are the description of persons who are to be thus tempted and assisted to leave our shores, the industrious or the idle? the able-bodied or the weak? the bees or the drones of society? This, it seems, our politicians have decided. Imagining the social edifice to be overloaded, they actually propose to remedy the evil by removing a part of its foundations!

(4.) Though these ideas are sufficiently absurd, they are neither new nor peculiar to any state of population. A philosopher of France, who may be quoted on either side the argument in which I am engaged, says, in his flippant manner, that there are countries in which a man is worth nothing, and others in which he is worth less than nothing: it passes at present for a proof of wisdom to pronounce this to be the predicament of a human being in almost every nation, and especially in our own; and the destiny of thousands is now to be decided by a pretty verbal antithesis. Mr. Malthus is yet plainer in his dogmas than Montesquieu, and boldly assures the honourable committee, that putting out of existence a thousand labourers here and there, would, nationally speaking, be an advantage. Thank GOD, these notions are as absurd and impolitic as they are selfish and cruel. In whose

! Third Emigration Report, p. 324, § 3246.

estimation is it, let us ask, that a man is worth less than nothing? In that of his GOD? No! He values one such at far beyond the worth of the material world! But this sort of valuation is perfectly ridiculous in the ears of the political economist, who, in taking upon himself to regulate the population of time, regulates that of eternity, a business to which he is equally called, and for which he is quite as well qualified. But it is the privilege of his luminous theory which is to dictate the policy, and determine the worth, of human beings, to make no references to a Deity; and in all his propositions regarding them, he can therefore console the statesman, as Mrs. Quickly did Sir John Faltsaff, "Now I, to comfort him, bid him a' should not think of GOD." Well, then, to forget GoD, and to argue the question on mere personal and selfish grounds: In the first, and infinitely the most important, view of the subject, man is worth every thing to himself; and on what other than mere selfish considerations do those argue, who hold the contrary notion? He is worth every thing to the little circle by whom he is surrounded, who become all to each other just in proportion as they have nothing else; and who feel the links that bind their hearts together, the more indissoluble, in that they may have been cemented in the furnace of affliction. Have I, then, or any man, political economist or otherwise, any right to pronounce my fellow-creature of no value, because I cannot make it out to my satisfaction that he is of any to me? And, supposing I have come to this complacent conclusion, has not such a one the right of retorting the doctring upon myself? and, if I am