Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/186

176 EMIGRATION persons, and where every immediate want of tbe emigrants may be supplied without leaving the depot. Letters may be written for them, or telegrams despatched to friends, or friends may be introduced immediately on their credentials being presented. The utmost care is taken to guard the immigrants from falling into bad hands, and every information is afforded them as to how they shall best proceed in their respective objects. The supervision thus exercised in the port is extended over the railways to the various parts of the Union to which immigrants may be bound. Besides such arrangements, no less honourable to the authorities of a country than encouraging to the emigrant, direct inducements have frequently been held out to settlers, both in the United States and the British colonies, in the form of grants of land or land at a cheap price, and in assisted or free passages. Unless it be when emigrants move in a large group or body, with the view of settling together in one place, a free grant of land may prove illusory, from not being suited to the industrial aptitudes of the emigrant or not situated in a locality where he would choose to reside. But when the Government of a state or colony offers assisted or free passages, it may be safely con cluded that there is immediate demand for the services of the emigrants ; and, as in such cases the classes of work people required are usually specified, there is an additional security against misunderstanding or misadventure. It may be observed that Her Majesty s commissioners of emigration will not advise intending emigrants where they should go or where their particular qualifications or occupations are in most demand; but they will sometimes warn intending emigrants where they should not go, and much evil might occasionally be averted were an appeal made to this negative advice, more especially when tempting offers and attractions are presented from quarters of the world in which the failures of emigration have hitherto been much more frequent than the successes. 1 The discussions thirty or forty years ago on organized methods of colonization have mostly disappeared in these later times. We hear no more of Mr Wakefield s scheme, though it was useful in familiarizing the public mind with the conditions of settling population successfully on distant and unoccupied territories. When a Highland community was evicted from its native glen in Scotland, or a High land clan was paralysed by the bankruptcy and ruin of its chief, it contributed to their successful establishment in Canada that they emigrated in a body, with such ties of kindred and loyalty as remained. Again, at the present day, the solitary Icelanders, moved by a spirit of emigra tion from the volcanic rock and desert to which their ancestors were driven by despotism and the Mennonites, invited into Russia by Paul to lay the foundation of the great wheat trade of Odessa, and now under expulsion by Alexander II. for refusing to bear arms, on the grounds of their original contract and conscientious scruples, are settling, in successive groups, with much promise of future happiness, in the Canadian province of Manitoba. From these and similar instances one can readily perceive the utility of organized emigration, and can scarcely doubt, so various and changeful is the condition of many isolated populations of the world, that it will long be a subject of practical study. But the reason, apparently, why modes and theories of colonization have almost passed out of the sphere of politics is that colonies are now so numerous and well established, and the means of entering into their 1 Those who may have occasion to pursue the details under this head are referred to an official publication of Her Majesty s emigra tion commission, entitled " No. 34, Colonization Circular 1877," in which will be found the spirit of nearly all the statutes (550) of states and colonies with which the emigration of the United Kingdom is related. social and industrial life so easy, that the consideration of initial forms has in great measure been superseded. Emi gration moves of itself over vast areas of population, sub ject to commercial and social causes in various parts of the world; and the duty of states is chiefly to give it outlet, and as much security as good administration can supply. The question whether countries receiving emigrants may not be called upon in some cases to check the flow of immigration within their borders is less free of difficulty than any similar question as regards the countries from which emigrants proceed, An example of what may happen has been seen in the Mormon ism of the United States, where the settlers were not only at variance with the republic on so cardinal a point as the civil law of mar riage, but at open war with the federal jurisdiction and sovereignty of the soil. Similar perplexities might arise from a large Chinese or other heathen immigration, intro ducing customs and observances which, though called religious and claiming toleration, could only be regarded as contrary to civil order, morality, and decency. Some dilemma of the same sort may even occur in the emi grant-giving countries, as, for instance, when trades- unionists, while deriving all the benefit of a large outward flow of labour, fall upon foreign workmen who immigrate into the United Kingdom with a violence and disorder which the law has not yet learned or been able to prevent. The statistics of emigration and immigration are copious enough, but being variously recorded by the numerous states and colonies, it is no easy task to bring them together in a general table, or to reduce them within moderate com pass. The countries receiving emigrants are usually more careful to distinguish the nationalities of the persons than the countries which they leave, or rather the countries from which they take their passage across the seas. In 1853 " foreigners " first began to be distinguished from British subjects in the returns of our emigration commissioners, and it may give some idea of the proportion in which the foreign element enters into the emigration of the United Kingdom to take a recent year. In 1874, for example, the emigrants who sailed from Britain are classified as fol lows : 116,490 English, 60,49G Irish, 20,286 Scotch, 38,465 foreigners, and 5277 " not distinguished." Yet considerable as the foreign element is in the United King dom statistics, its destination is small towards either our North American or Australasian colonies, and flows in the largest bulk to the United States, where the nationality of the immigrants is minutely discriminated in the returns of the emigration bureau. The table given below shows in decennial periods the main currents of European emigration and its principal destinations during the half century from 1820 to 1869 inclusive. The " all other places," under which term statistics usually embrace the emigration not contained in the table, receive but a small though a growing portion of the persons who leave Europe with a view to industrial settlement elsewhere. There is the emigration to the Paver Plate, remarkable less for its amount than for the hold it possesses over the Latin races ; and there is the emigration to the South African colonies, more promising of results in the future than can be gathered from its actual progress, In the Cape Colony and its various annexations there are 187,000 white or European settlers in a population of 776,000; and in the special colony of Natal only about one-seventh of the population are of European origin. The immigration to the River Plate in the six years 1868-73 was 250,698, of which in 1872 and 1873, when the immigration was largest, 56 per cent, were Italians, 19 Spaniards, 16 French, 3 British, 5 Germans, and 1 per cent, various, : the proportion of

males being 73, and females 27.