It is this which most strikes the European imagination. The Old World is nearly all appropriated by individuals. There are public domains in most foreign countries, but of comparatively small amount, and mostly forests. With this exception, every acre of land in Europe is private property, and in such countries as England, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy, what little changes hands is sold only at a high price. I presume the number of landholders in England is far less than in the State of New York. In the course of the French Revolution the land has been greatly divided and subdivided in France and in Germany, and is now held in small farms; but owing to the limited quantity of purchasable land, these farms, when sold, are sold only at high prices. Generally speaking, the mass of the inhabitants of Europe regard the ability to hold and occupy a considerable landed property as the summit of human fortune. The suggestion that there is a country beyond the ocean, where fertile land is to be purchased, in any quantity, at a dollar and a quarter per acre, and that dollar and a quarter to be earned in many parts of the country by the labor of a single day, strikes them as the tales of Aladdin's lamp or Ali Baba's cave would strike us, if we thought they were true. They forget the costs and sacrifices of leaving home, the ocean to be traversed, the weary pilgrimage in the land of strangers after their arrival. They see nothing with the mind's eye but the "land of promise "; they reflect upon nothing but the fact, that there is a region on the earth's surface where a few days' unskilled labor will purchase the fee-simple of an ample farm. Such an attraction would be irresistible under any circumstances to the population of an old country, where, as I have just said, the land is all appropriated, and to be purchased, in any considerable quantity, only at prices which put its acquisition beyond the thought of the masses. But this is but half the tale. It must not be forgotten that in this ancient and venerable Europe, whose civilization is the growth of two thousand years, where some of the luxurious refinements of life are carried to a perfection of which we have scarcely an idea in this country, a considerable part of the population, even in the most prosperous regions, pass their lives in a state but one. remove from starvation, poorly fed, poorly clothed, poorly housed, without education, without political privileges, without moral culture. The average wages of the agricultural laborer in England were estimated a year ago at 9s. 6d. sterling - about $ 2.371⁄2 -per week. The condition of the working population on the continent of Europe is in no degree better, if as good. They eat but little animal food either in England or on the Continent. We form romantic notions at a distance of countries that abound in wine and oil; but in the best governed states of Italy, in Tuscany, for instance, the peasantry, though they pass their lives in the vineyard and the olive-orchard, consume the fruit of neither. I have seen the Tuscan peasants, unable to bear the cost of the most ordinary wine from the vineyards in which their cottages are embowered, and which can be bought at retail for a cent a flask, pouring water over the grape-skins as they come from the press, and making that their beverage. Even for persons in comparatively easy circumstances in Europe, there are strong inducements to emigrate to America. Most of the governments are arbitrary, the taxes are oppressive, the exactions of military service onerous in the extreme. Add to all this the harassing insecurity of life. For sixty or seventy years the Continent has been one wide theatre of scarcely intermitted convulsion. Every country in it has been involved in war; there is scarcely one that has not passed through a revolution. We read of events like these in the newspapers, we look upon them with curiosity as articles of mere intelligence, or they awaken images of our own revolution, which we regard only with joyous associations. Far different the state of things in crowded Europe, of which the fairest fields are trampled in every generation by mighty armies into bloody mire! Dazzled by the brilliancy of the military exploits of which we read at a safe distance, we forget the anxieties of those who grow up within the sound of the cannon's roar, whose prospects in life are ruined, their business broken up, their little accumulations swept away by the bankruptcy of governments or the general paralysis of the industry of the country, their sons torn from them by ruthless conscriptions, the means of educating and bringing up their families consumed in a day by disastrous emergencies. Terrified by the recent experience or the tradition of these miseries, thousands emigrate to the land of promise, flying before, not merely the presence, but the "rumor of war," which the Great Teacher places on a level with the reality. Ever and anon some sharp specific catastrophe gives an intense activity to emigration. When France, in the lowest depth of her Revolution, plunged to a lower depth of suffering and crime, when the Reign of Terror was enthroned, and when every thing in any way conspicuous, whether for station, wealth, talent, or service, of every age and of either sex, from the crowned monarch to the gray-haired magistrate and the timid maiden, was brought to the guillotine, hundreds of thousands escaped at once from the devoted kingdom. The convulsions of San Domingo drove most of the European population of that island to the United States. But beyond every thing else which has been witnessed in modern times, the famine which prevailed a few years since in Ireland gave a terrific impulse to emigration. Not less, probably, than one million of her inhabitants left her shores within five years. The population of this island, as highly favored in the gifts of nature as any spot on the face of the earth, has actually diminished more than 1,800,000 since the famine year; the only example, perhaps, in history, of a similar result in a country not visited by foreign war or civil convulsion. The population ought, in the course of nature, to have increased within ten years by at least that amount; and in point of fact, between 1840 and 1850, our own population increased by more than six millions. * London Quarterly Review for December, 1851, p. 191. * This prodigious increase of the population of the United States is partly owing to the emigration from foreign countries, which has taken place under the influence of the causes general and specific, to which I have alluded. Of late years, from three to four hundred thousand immigrants are registered at the several custom-houses, as arriving in this country in the course of a year. It is probable that a third as many more enter by the Canadian frontier. Not much less than two millions of immigrants are supposed to have entered the United States in the last ten years; and it is calculated that there are living at the present day in the United States five millions of persons, foreigners who have immigrated since 1790, and their descendants. There is nothing in the annals of mankind to be compared to this; but there is a series of great movements which may be contrasted with it. In the period of a thousand years, which began about three or four hundred years before our Saviour, the Roman republic and empire were from time to time invaded by warlike races from the North and East, who burst with overwhelming force upon the South and West of Europe, and repeatedly carried desolation to the gates of Rome. These multitudinous invaders were not armies of men, they were in reality nations of hostile emigrants. They came with their wives, with their "young barbarians," with their Scythian cavalry, and their herds of cattle; and they came with no purpose of going away. The animus manendi was made up before they abandoned their ice-clad homes; they left their Arctic allegiance behind them. They found the sunny banks of the Arno and the Rhone more pleasant than those of the Don and the Volga. Unaccustomed to the sight of any tree more inviting than the melancholy fir and the stunted birch, its branches glittering with snowy crystals,brought up under a climate where the generous fruits are unknown, — these children of the North were not so much fascinated as bewildered "in the land of the citron and myrtle "; they gazed with delighted astonishment at the spreading elm, festooned with Falernian clusters; they clutched, with a kind of frantic joy, at the fruit of the fig-tree and the olive; at the melting peach, the luscious plum, the golden orange, and the pomegranate, whose tinted cheek outblushes every thing but the living carnation of youthful love. "With grim delight the brood of winter view A brighter day and heavens of azure hue, By the fortune of war, single detachments and even mighty armies frequently suffered defeat; but their place was immediately taken by new hordes, which fell upon declining Rome as the famished wolves in one of Catlin's pictures fall upon an aged buffalo in our Western prairies. The imperial monster, powerful even in his decrepitude, would often scatter their undisciplined array with his iron tusks, and trample them by thousands under his brazen feet; but when he turned back, torn and bleeding, to his seven hills, tens of thousands came howling from the Northern forests, who sprang at his throat and buried their fangs in his lacerated side. Wherever they conquered, and in the end they conquered everywhere, they established themselves on the soil, invited new-comers, and from their union with the former inhabitants, the nations of the South and West of Europe, at the present day, for the most part, trace their descent. We know but little of the numbers thus thrown in upon the Roman republic and empire in the course of eight or ten centuries. They were, no doubt, greatly exaggerated by the panic fear of the inhabitants; and the pride of the Roman historians would lead them to magnify the power before. which their own legions had so often quailed. But when we consider the difficulty of subsisting a large number of persons in a march through an unfriendly country, and this at a time when much of the now cultivated portion of Europe was covered with forest and swamp, I am disposed to think that the hosts which for a succession of centuries overran |