THE TIDE OF EMIGRATION. [From the " Times."]

New Zealander, Volume 8, Issue 618, 17 March 1852, Page 2

THE TIDE OF EMIGRATION. [From the " Times."]

There is a branch of statistics which has been lately forced into notice by actual events of a new and extraordinary character. " The statist" no longer confines himself to populations, that ia to the number of persons dwelling quietly in certain countries and cities, and such sober facts, for society itself is undergoing a change, and is no longer content to dwell quietly. Strange to say, our railways, our steamers, and our mastery of the ocean have brought us back," in some respects, to the habits of the Nomads and Massagetae, or the Crusaders and pilgrims of a later age. Within half a year six million visits have been paid to the great shrine of art by persons who have travelled scores, and hundreds, and thousands of miles for the purpose. Excursion trains bring up four or five thousand a-day by one line of railway. Eighty-five thousand children sang " God save the Queen" at Manchester on Friday, and fifty thousand adults repeated the hymn the next day in Hyde Park. We forget how many millions are returned as having travelled by railway last year. The visits to the British Museum and the Thames Tunnel are now of the millionaire class. Twenty years ago the figure of the national debt stood alone in its glory, as the only work of man that approached to the infinite, and was really stupendous. We are now so familiar with great figures, that the national debt is descending, by comparison, to the level of our ordinary conceptions. But, among all these vast figures that are becoming domesticated and vulgar, there is none so important, though so familiar, as the figures of the emigration which is actually draining these isles. We have repeated almost ad nauseam that the people are leaving us at the rate of near a thousand a-day. " Very well; what of that ? They are only Irishmen, with a sprinkling of the everwandering Scotch, and some of the less fortunate or respectable of our own countrymen." Be they what they may, the fact remains that we are witnessing a phenomenon of the same class with the migrations of the Gauls, the Goths, the Huns, the Turks, the Magyars, and other tribes, that before the settlement of Europe roamed about looking for a home. "Familiarity," it is said, " breeds contempt;" and certain it is that no sooner is a great fact familiar than men treat it with indifference, and do not even seem to apprehend it correctly, much less follow it up to its consequences. In Ireland the fact is brought home to the understanding in so forcible a manner by the actual sight of emigrant-trains, emigrant-ships, depopulated distiicts, ruined habitations, and labour beginning to rise in the market, that it cannot be disposed of so easily as in this country. The journals there have styled the movement the " Celtic exodus;" and, considering the actual difference between the condition of an average Irish peasant at home and that which he easily attains to in the United States, we shall not quarrel with the reflection which the name seems to cast on the rulers left behind. The writers who treat of this exodus tell us that it will go on till the whole race is departed and their place left untenanted. Having once begun, the migra • tion will go on; and the strong social instincts that have hitherto bound the Irishman to the soil of his birth will now operate in drawing him into the great westward stream. In England it has been anticipated by some writers, that when the Irish population should be reduced to a certain low level, the inducements to remain would rise so high that the migration would stop, and the remnant left behind would be contentedly and permanently attached to the soil. The Irish authorities, as we are disposed to think very correctly, do not expect the migration to stop as soon as the population has assumed its proper proportion to the work to be done. The people who have been in the habit of paying 30s. an acre would not now remain on the land if it were reduced to 20s. or 10s. —they will have it at no price. Their minds are completely made up to go after their friends —to go home, that home not being " Ould Ireland," but the "Far West!" The stream once set that way, it will not stop till Ireland is absolutely depopulated, and the only question is, when will that be ? Twenty years at the present rate would take away the whole of the industrious classes, leaving only the 2^oprietors and their families, members of the learned professions, and those whose age or infirmities keep them at home. Twenty years are but a short time in treating great social or political questions. It is more than twenty years since the passing of the Emancipation Act and the introduction of tiie Reform Bill. What if it should really come to pass that before another twenty years the whole Celtic race shall have disappeared from these isles, and the problem of seven centuries received its solution ? We dwell in wonderful times, in an age of great discoveries, splendid improvements, and grand consummations. Art has always been found the handmaid of human developments. The discovery of gunpowder put an end to the little wars and little states of the middle ages, and introduced larger political manipulations. The discovei*y of printing prepared for the revival of learning and arts, and paved the way to the Information. The discovery of the mariner's compass showed our navigators a path to the East Indies and the New World. It mny be the first mission of railways to set all the populations of the old world on the move, and send them in quest of independent and comfortable homes. And when will this movement stop ? Incuriousness and prejudice are renrly with the reply, that it will stop, at all events, when the Celtic race is exhausted. The Englishman, we are assured, is too attached to his country, and too comfortable at home, to cross the Atlantic. But sutely it is very premature to name any such period for this movement, or to say beforehand what English labourers will do, when seven or. eight millions of Irish have led the way to comfort and independence. The Englishman is now attached to his own home, because he knows of no other. His ideas of other regions are dark and dismal. lie trembles at the thought of having to giopo his way through tho Cimmerian obscurity

of another hemisphere. The single fact that he will have no "parish" in America is, in his mind, a fatal bar to locomotion. But all this is quick passing away. Geography, union workhouses, ocean mails, and the daily sight of letters arriving in ten days from prosperous emigrants, are fat>l unrooting the British rustics from the soil, and giving him cosmopolitan ideas. In a very few years the question uppermost in his mind will be whether he will be belter off here or there? "Whether he should go with the young and enterprising-, or stay at home with the old and stupid ? If a quarter of a million British subjects have left this country for the Australian colonies in the present generation, there may easily be a much larger movement to a nearer and more wealthy region. It has been imagined, indeed, that such a migration will have a natural tendency to stop itself at a certain stage. We fiiv told that the English labourer will find a new lield in Ireland, deserted by the Celt. It will, however, cost no more effort of mind to cross the ocean at once than to cross the Irish Channel for a land which, in the English mind, must ever be associated with violence and blood. High wages, again, we are told, the enjoyment of a liberal government, and an improved condition, will bind the Englishman afresh to the soil of his ancestors. But when you make the English labourer richer, more independent, more intelligent, and more of a citizen, you have put him more in a condition and temper to seek his fortune, wherever it may be found. The men who in the United States leave their homes for the Far West aye generally they who have prospered where they are, and whoAvant the excitement of another start in life. Ou the whole, we are disposed to think that the prospect is far too serious to be neglected, or treated as a merely speculative question. f lhe depopulation of these isles, supposing tho Celtic exodus to run out its course, and a British exodus to follow, constitute about as serious a political event as can be conceived; for a change of dynasty or any other political revolution is nothing compaied with a change in the people themselves. All the departments of industry, the army, the navy, the cultivation of the fields, the rent of landed property, the profit of trades, the payment of rates and taxes, depend on the people, and without the people there must ensue a general collapse of all our institutions. We are, however, rather desirous to recommend the question to the consideration of others, and especially of our statesmen, than to answer it ourselves.