life, due to
that insularity of mental attitude characteristic of every nation,
making it prefer its own customs and criticize those of its neighbours,
summed up in the phrase "dislike of foreigners"--it is found that
British opinion was centred upon two main threads; first America as a
place for emigration and, second, American political ideals and
institutions[10].

British emigration to America, a governmentally favoured colonization
process before the American revolution, lost that favour after 1783,
though not at first definitely opposed. But emigration still continued
and at no time, save during the war of 1812, was it absolutely stopped.
Its exact amount is unascertainable, for neither Government kept
adequate statistics before 1820. With the end of the Napoleonic wars
there came great distress in England from which the man of energy sought
escape. He turned naturally to America, being familiar, by hearsay at
least, with stories of the ease of gaining a livelihood there, and
influenced by the knowledge that in the United States he would find
people of his own blood and speech. The bulk of this earlier emigration
to America resulted from economic causes. When, in 1825, one energetic
Member of Parliament, Wilmot Horton, induced the Government to appoint a
committee to investigate the whole subject, the result was a mass of
testimony, secured from returned emigrants or from their letters home,
in which there constantly appeared one main argument influencing the
labourer type of emigrant; he got good wages, and he was supplied, as a
farm hand, with good food. Repeatedly he testifies that he had "three
meat meals a day," whereas in England he had ordinarily received but one
such meal a week.

Mere good living was the chief inducement for the labourer type of
emigrant, and the knowledge of such living created for this type
remaining in England a sort of halo of industrial prosperity surrounding
America. But there was a second testimony brought out by Horton's
Committee, less general, yet to be picked up here and there as evidence
of another argument for emigration to America. The labourer did not
dilate upon political equality, nor boast of a share in government,
indeed generally had no such share, but he did boast to his fellows at
home of the social equality, though not thus expressing it, which was
all about him. He was a common farm hand, yet he "sat down to meals"
with his employer and family, and worked in the