Then it is said, the emigrants will still go to the States. That entirely depends on this,-whether you care for them, or rather for yourselves, when they land, or whether you still, on the let-alone theory, abandon them to wander or perish.

In the United States they can get employment, and buy land at a dollar an acre. But they might have both within a week's journey of their native country.

Ingenious people have conceived the notion of transplanting to the Colonies, an old community readymade; setting it up as they would a ready-made wood or iron house. They must have parson and squire, and landlord and tenant, shopkeeper, journeyman, apprentice, and labourer in Australia, or in the American forest, just as they have in a village of Yorkshire or Devonshire. Of course, where land is in plenty, all the labourers, journeymen, and apprentices run away, and all the tenants too. All would fain cultivate their own land with their own hands, without being obliged to pay either rent or wages, and leave the squire and the landlord to do the same. But is this irresistible natural tendency in new countries to the creation of an industrious yeomanry an evil? Quite the contrary. Only it requires, like every thing else, some artificial

regulation.

Don't spurn the first gift of nature-CHEAP LAND. Bring down the government price of your colonial lands everywhere, to the American standard of a dollar an acre, and then take measures which will soon make

them worth five pounds an acre to the purchaser. What are those measures? Why is land in Yorkshire worth so much more than land in New Brunswick or Canada? Among other reasons for this reason: in Yorkshire the occupier is surrounded with neighbours. In New Brunswick or Canada he lives in a solitude. His next neighbour is perhaps twenty miles off. The nearest church forty miles away. What is wanting is the presence of resident occupiers all around him. Then the awful solitude of the forest is cheered by the human face divine, and the music of the human voice. Then there is fertilization, society, mutual help, friendship, churches, schools, roads, commerce.

How is this state of things to be brought about? We have seen that the natural tendency of new countries in temperate regions, is to the creation of a class of small proprietors, cultivating small occupations with their own hands. On this fact two measures might be founded.

First, all allotments might be restricted to such a quantity of land as a man and his family can reasonably be expected to cultivate with their own hands.

Secondly, the actual residence of the proprietor on his allotment might be a condition. If he will neither reside, nor sell to him that will, non-residence must be a ground of forfeiture, or escheat to the crown.

Large grants of unoccupied lands, must, under no pretext whatever, be permitted. Thus the complete subjugation and permanent improvement of the land,

will be married from the very first, to the comforts and helps of neighbourhood, to the elevating influences of christian civilization.

Under such regulations the phalanx will gradually, but certainly, march to universal dominion over the the continent.

But we have, and are likely to have, criminal emigrants.

The increase of crime in Great Britain is now truly frightful. In vain do you build penitentiaries, and inflict the barbarous torture of solitary confinement; an exquisite cruelty worthy of the darkest ages. It has not even the excuse of being exemplary. It does not deter others. For they that have not endured it can but darkly guess its severity, from the physical and mental ruin, that it entails on the miserable sufferers.

And do your English criminals deserve all this? Crimes in England are chiefly crimes against property. When judge and criminal shall hereafter be both arraigned together, before that merciful but all-discerning and perfect justice, which looking into the heart, makes all just allowances for involuntary ignorance, and the irresistible pressure of temptation or want, which will appear the most advantageous apparel, the rags, or the scarlet and ermine robe?

But the criminal, (though in the eye of reason less a criminal than is commonly supposed,) must, in the mean time, be punished. Your pretended prison disci

pline will destroy him. Australia and the Cape will not have him. Here is the Halifax and Quebec railway close at hand asking for his labor, and when that is done, you may go on, if you like, to the Pacific Ocean. Asa Whitney has demonstrated that your railway thither need not cost a farthing, even although you should not have the advantage of this slave-labor. That labor may be made as penal as you please. But in the mean time it is useful. Above all it is truly reformatory. What becomes of the miserable outcast that issues from your English dungeons? Which has branded him deepest, his sin or his jail? But in New Brunswick, the convict, after suffering his punishment, is on the high road to vast tracts where he may ultimately settle, without objection by any one, and be surrounded, not with every hindrance, but with every help to becoming an honest man, and a valuable subject.

All this is a faint and partial outline of what an English colony can do for us. Let some abler hand fill up the picture. And then it is only one of a large collection.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

"The value of every thing must now be settled by universal and unregulated competition."

So say the modern free-traders.

"No!' say the socialists, 'Competition is all wrong: Look at the miseries it produces. Co-operation is to be the panacea.'

Both these new sects however, would fain persuade us that the world and human life is henceforth to be something different and very superior to what it has always been. Both seem to forget, that we have been in a high state of civilization for three or four hundred years. Neither bear in mind, that a large portion of evil, private and social, is the inseparable and perpetual accompaniment of our imperfect nature. Both liken the beneficent and universal Parent to a capricious and unnatural father, who, having neglected his first-born children, should unjustly favour his younger offspring. Both represent human life as a feast, at which there is a succession of guests: but the generations that sat down first found a scanty and miserable board, while plenty of substantial and invigorating viands were kept back for those who should sit down last.