has been, and is, the tendency of that modern colonization which is based upon the idea of cheapening labor, land, and raw materials of every kind — thus extending slavery throughout the earth. Under it, all local centres tend to disappear; the land declines in its power; production diminishes; the landholder acquires power; competition for the purchase of labor diminishes, while competition for its sale increases from year to year; and man becomes less free with constantly-growing necessity for fleeing to other lands, if he would not perish of famine at home. Under it, Irishmen have been forced to fly their country-seeking in. England and America the food and clothing that could no longer be obtained in their native land.* Under it the world has witnessed the annihilation of the local centres of India, attended with an amount of ruin to which there can be found "no parallel in the annals of commerce." Under it, Asiatic industry, "from Smyrna to Canton, from Madras to Samarcand," has received, as we are told by Mr. McCulloch, a shock from which it is unlikely ever to recover the result being seen in the large export of Hindoo laborers to the Mauritius, and Chinese coolies to Cuba and Demarara. Under it, little short of two millions of blacks were carried to the British West Indies, two-thirds of whom had disappeared before the passage of the act of Emancipation leaving behind them no descendants. Under it, the people of Turkey and Portugal gradually decline in numberslocal centres disappearing land declining in value-and the power of production diminishing from year to year. § Under it, Canada has been deprived of all power to diversify her industry, and now presents to view vast bodies of people who are wholly unable to sell their labor- her power of attraction, as a cor

"Prosperity and happiness may some day reign over that beautiful island. Its fertile soil, its rivers and lakes, its water-power, its minerals, and other materials for the wants and luxuries of man, may one day be developed; but all appearances are against the belief that this will ever happen in the days of the Celt. That tribe will soon fulfil the great law of Providence which seems to enjoin and reward the union of races. It will mix with the Anglo-American, and be known no more as a jealous and separate people. Its present place will be occupied by the more mixed, more docile, and more serviceable race, which has long borne the yoke of sturdy industry in this island, which can submit to a master and obey the law. This is no longer a dream, for it is a fact now in progress, and every day more apparent." London Times. See ante, vol. i. p. 297.

See ante, vol. i. p. 349.

See ante, vol. i. pp. 308, 311.

rector of the evils attendant upon transatlantic centralization, having, therefore, wholly ceased. Under it, China has been inundated with opium to such an extent as to have paved the way for a repetition, in that country, of the exhaustive process that has been pursued in India.* Under it, the people of the United States have already exhausted many of the older States, and are now repeating the operation throughout the valley of the Mississippi. Look where we may, among the countries subjected to the British system, we find the results the same - the necessity for colonization growing steadily, with constant decline in the productiveness of the soil, and in the value of land and man.

The destruction of life in China from this extension of the market for the produce of India is stated at no less than 400,000 per annum. How this trade is regarded in India itself, by Christian men, may be seen from the following extract from a review, recently published in the Bombay Telegraph, of papers in regard to it published in Hunt's Merchants' Magazine, in which the review is now republished:

"That a professedly Christian government should, by its sole authority and on its sole responsibility, produce a drug which is not only contraband, but essentially detrimental to the best interests of humanity; that it should annually receive into its treasury crores of rupees, which, if they cannot, save by a too licentious figure, be termed the price of blood,' yet are demonstrably the price of the physical waste, the social wretchedness, and moral destruction of the Chinese; and yet that no sustained remonstrances from the press, secular or spiritual, nor from society, should issue forth against the unrighteous system, is surely an astonishing fact in the history of our Christian ethics.

"An American, accustomed to receive from us impassioned arguments against his own nation on account of slavery, might well be pardoned were he to say to us, with somewhat of intemperate feeling, Physician, heal thyself,' and to expose with bitterness the awful inconsistency of Britain's vehement denunciation of American slavery, while, by most deadly measures, furthering Chinese demoralization."

--

The review, in referring to the waste of human life, closes as follows: "What unparalleled destruction! The immolations of an Indian Juggernauth dwindle into insignificance before it! We again repeat, nothing but slavery is worthy to be compared for its horrors with this monstrous system of iniquity. As we write, we are amazed at the enormity of its unprincipledness, and the large extent of its destructiveness. Its very enormity seems in some measure to protect it. Were it a minor evil, it seems as though one might grapple with it. As it is, it is beyond the compass of our grasp. No words are adequate to expose its evil, no fires of indignant feeling are fierce enough to blast it.

"The enormous wealth it brings into our coffers is its only justification, the cheers of vice-enslaved wretches its only welcome; the curses of all that is moral and virtuous in an empire of three hundred and sixty millions attend its introduction; the prayers of enlightened Christians deprecate its course; the indignation of all righteous minds is its only God-speed.'

"It takes with it fire and sword, slaughter and death; it leaves behind it bankrupt fortunes, idiotized minds, broken hearts, and ruined souls. Foe to all the interests of humanity, hostile to the scanty virtues of earth, and warring against the overflowing benevolence of heaven, may we soon have to rejoice over its abolition!"

Against this system, all the more advancing countries of the world have protected themselves-seeking, by means of protection, to establish that counter-attraction without which there can be no harmony in either the physical or social world. In all of these, it is increasing the competition for the purchase of labor, and thus offering a bounty on the import of all those kinds of human faculty in which they are yet deficient. In all, it is facilitating the export of that peculiar description of faculty that is now in excess and thus promoting the establishment of the perfect balance of attractions required for the maintenance of harmony in the social movement. In proof of this we have the facts, that while Australia is filled with people who have been transported at the public cost; and while the great mass of those arriving in America from Ireland have been enabled to leave their homes only by aid of remittances from their friends abroad; those coming from the continent not only pay their own passages, but bring with them, also, considerable capital, by aid of which to become proprietors of land.*

§ 4. Turning now to the United States, we find a perpetually-varying system-the general tendency, however, being towards that policy which looks to exhaustion of the land of the older States, and expulsion of the laborers towards the West. At times, as in the period from 1825 to 1835-in that from 1843 to 1847-and in the first few years of the California gold excitement-there has been a tendency towards the creation of local centres of attraction, attended by growing competition for the purchase of the laborer's services, and consequent large increase of immigration. Under the free trade system, competition for the sale of labor has always grown, and immigration has died away the foreign laborer losing the power to determine for himself whether he shall remain at home or go abroad.† Under the one, the attractive power of the land has increased — enabling the American to stay at home, and inducing the foreigner to come

* The amount remitted from America to Ireland in the seven years, 18481854, for aiding emigration, is stated at £8,393,000, or about $40,000,000. The "cash means" in the hands of immigrants (so far as ascertained) arriving in the port of New York, in 1856, was $9,642,104. The real amount was supposed to be much in excess of this.

from abroad to co-operate with him in his labors. Under the other, the expulsive power has grown rapidly-compelling the American to leave his home and fly to the West; while equally compelling the foreigner to remain at home, even when unable to obtain the food and clothing required for satisfaction of his wants.

As a rule, American policy has tended in the direction of the British system—the departures therefrom, in the last forty years, having been but two in number, and for periods that have been very brief.* In all cases in which that has been the direction of the movement, competition for the purchase of labor has diminished, and immigration has gradually died away. In all such cases, the abandonment of the older States has rapidly increased, and with what effects may now be shown.

Looking first to New England, we witness an emigration of the most remarkable kind- each and every stage thereof being accompanied by consolidation of the land, diminution of cultivation, and decline of power to maintain schools, churches, roads, and government. From one quarter, we hear that it has become "evident that the number of families in quite a number of our agricultural towns is growing less. The old homesteads," as we are further told, "become the property of the adjacent husbandman, or go to ruin under the proprietorship of some far-off owner From another, we learn, that "many of the churches are reduced to the last extremity," and that, "but for the missionary society, by which not a few of them are supplied, they would yield at once to utter discouragement." Such being the general tendency throughout New England, the "wonder is not," as we are told, "that so many Eastern churches are drooping, but that they have so long borne up against the constant and copious depletion of their vigor and their piety."

Turning now to New York, we find the average yield of wheat to have fallen to little more than a dozen bushels the diminution of the rural population, and the consolidation of the land, becoming, consequently, more rapid with each successive year. Taking next, the western portion of the State, one of the finest wheat-growing countries of the world, so recently a wilderness, we find its farmers already engaged in discussing the neces

* See ante, vol. ii. p. 226.

sity for abandoning the wheat culture, as the only means of freeing themselves from the ravages of insects, provided by the Creator for the removal of diseased and decaying vegetable matter. Compelled to the exhaustion of their soil, and unable to vary their cultivation, their plants become weaker from year to year, and more and more fitted to become the prey of the fly, and other enemies. As a consequence of this it is, that emigration steadily increases, and that the power to maintain the local institutions as steadily declines.

Ohio and Indiana are rapidly following in the same direction, and yet the occupation of the latter dates back less than forty years. Looking now further, we see in Virginia, a land capable of feeding and clothing the whole people of Britain, yet declining steadily in wealth and power. Carolina and Georgia have almost ceased to grow in numbers; while Alabama, a State that, but forty years ago, was still in possession of Creeks and Cherokees, is following rapidly in the train of both the yield of her soil decreasingland becoming consolidated-and the power of extending, or even maintaining, churches and schools, declining from year to year.

*

By all the advocates of the Ricardo-Malthusian doctrine, the past prosperity of the American people has been uniformly attributed to the abundance of fertile soils at their command. They have been supposed to be receiving wages for their services, plus the amount that elsewhere would be absorbed as rent. It being, however, the poorer soils that are always first appropriated, and the richer ones remaining unproductive until wealth and population have greatly grown, it is obvious that they have been wasting upon the former a vast amount of labor — while subjecting themselves to a tax of transportation greater than would have been required for the support of armies ten times greater than those of assembled Europe. Rich meadow lands in the Atlantic States have remained in a state of nature, while millions of people have sought the West, there to obtain from an acre of land some 30 or 40 bushels of corn, three-fourths of which have been absorbed on their route to the distant markets. Acres of turnips or potatoes yield 12 or 14 tons, whereas the average yield of all the wheat

* See ante, vol. ii. pp. 198, 242.