to {330} offer you in exchange!" But to those of decreasing means, and increasing families, uprooted, withering, and seeking a transplantation somewhere, full of hard, dirty-handed industry, and with means sufficient for location here, I would say, "Haste away; you have no other refuge from poverty, which, in England, is crime, punishable with neglect, and contempt everlasting!" But, if you come, come one and all of you, male and female, in your working jackets, with axes, ploughshares, and pruning-hooks in your hands, prepared long to suffer many privations, expecting to be your own servants,—no man's masters; to find liberty and independence, any thing but soft indulgence; and America, a land only of everlasting, well-rewarded labour. Thus, morally and physically qualified, the dark, lonely wilds and interminable forests, which now surround me, shall bow before you, yielding to your cultivation every common good thing, but not satisfaction, which is not of earthly growth! For you, even you, escaped from prisons and pauperism, will, sometimes, 'hang your harps on the willow, and weep,' when you remember distant England. Very few emigrants, whatsoever may have been their disgusts and evils in the old country, or their successes in the new, can forget their 'dear native land.' The recollection is, indeed, an impediment to their prosperity; distance only enhances her value, and, as a much-loved, ungrateful mistress, her charms only {331} are remembered and cherished. This seems an indestructible feeling; the incurable mania of the British exile.
I am now living on wild bucks and bears, mixed up, and barbarizing with men almost as wild as they: men, systematically unprincipled, and in whom the moral sense seems to have no existence: this is the lot of all coming
