ts is to be found among those independent small
farmers who appear to understand something like comfort. One of these
men holding, say sixteen or eighteen acres, has a family we will suppose
of four sons and three daughters. This family grows up, the eldest son
marries, and the father, having no other way to provide for him, sets
apart three or four acres of his farm, on which he and his wife settle.
The second comes also to marry, and hopes his father won't treat him
worse than he treated his brother. He accordingly gets four acres more,
and settles down as his brother did. In this manner the holding is
frittered away and subdivided among them. For the first few years--that
is, before their children rise--they may struggle tolerably well; but,
at the expiration of twenty or twenty-five years, each brother finds
himself with such a family as his little strip of land cannot adequately
support, setting aside the claims of the landlord altogether; for rent
in these cases is almost out of the question.

What, then, is the consequence? Why, that here is to be found a
population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of
their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a
country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the
demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen
upon it--a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution
under which it groans.

Such is the history of one class of emigrants in this unhappy land,
of ours; and what small farmer, with such a destiny as that we have
detailed staring him and his in the face, would not strain every nerve
that he might fly to any country--rather than remain to encounter the
frightful state of suffering which awaits him in this.

Such, then, is an illustration of the motives which prompt one class
of emigrants to seek their fortune in other climes, while it is yet in
their power to do so. There is still a higher class, however, consisting
of strong farmers possessed of some property and wealth, who, on looking
around them, find that the mass of destitution which is so rapidly
increasing in every direction must necessarily press upon them in time,
and ultimately drag them down to its own level. But even if the naked
evils which pervade society among us were not capable of driving these
independent yeomen to other lands, we can assure our legislators
that what these circumstances, appalling