have grown beyond measure; enclosed in the island which she occupies, she cannot enlarge its diameter, nor offer a theatre for labor proportionate to their need to these eager and famished avidities. Hence that furious competition, that excessive and vehement rivalry; that crowd which blocks up all the avenues of commerce and fortune; hence that difficulty of employing capital; that frightful pauperism; those poor laws which only aggravate the evil; that plethora which keeps up a permanent and burning fever in the veins of a vigorous body. Economists try a thousand means to counterbalance this movement, and to oppose a barrier to the progress of evil, which is, after all, only the progress of industry, of opulence and of commerce.

Mr. Malthus and Miss Martineau request the English not to marry any more, or at least very seldom, for the love of their country, since the increase of population is the evident. source of the scourge. Other philosophers counsel the annual exportation of the poor to the American, Australian and even African colonies. While they offer an issue and means of decrease to this hungry crowd, permitting them to go work and die in some wild land far from their native one, England herself receives pauper crowds from Ireland, who not only replace the expatriated workmen, but lower, by their extreme misery and need, the price of labor, and increase the hardness of the lot of those who have not left the country. England, then, is like a vase, emptying itself at one end to be filled at another.

Ireland is a perpetual manufactory of poor-devil sans-culottes, who have no trade, and who, with three potatoes in their hand, cross the channel and go to demand work in England for the lowest possible wages. They get it, and then stretch themselves to sleep upon their rags. I wish that philanthropists and calculators would think of these things: they

would see one of the many proofs that Europe cannot possibly long keep up its supremacy on the globe, and one of the gravest symptoms of that change, which is more interesting, than the revolutions of the Roman Empire; and which will undoubtedly give the sceptre of human destinies into the hands of those who are now in apprenticeship but who will soon be emancipated.

This far sight belongs only to philosophers. Statesmen in England act wisely in encouraging with all their power, the emigration of poor families, the foundation of new colonies, the extension of the old ones, and the employment of industry and national ambition outside of the small field offered by the mother country. There are now ten new Colonies which are beginning to flourish under the protection of the British government. I mention those in the Canadian Backwoods, and in Southern and Western Australia. The United States profit by the reception of immense numbers of Irish: workers, women, children, old men, throw themselves on board of vessels, cross the Atlantic, offer the feebleness or strength of their arms, are accepted, and die at the end of a few months or years, crushed by hard toil. They gain twice as much as they did at home, work six times as hard, and perish six times as soon. Their efforts are like combats. The American people in the course of its progress cares little for fatigue, nor for the existences devoured and absorbed by it. It walks or rather runs on; and be sure that it will not halt soon. Usurpation is easy to it, is necessary, almost fatal, in the sense of the Antique Destiny: we have seen with what facility, and irresistible motion Texas became part of the States.

English statesmen have a thousand motives for throwing their poor population into the woods of Canada, and to make of them an intervening rampart against the invasion of the American Confederation. They arm themselves against two

enemies at a time; against the old French population of Canada, and the Republicans of the States, who know so well how to act for their own advantage. It is in order to favor and increase these emigrations that the British government has published and profusely distributed "Letters of certain indigent Persons who have emigrated to Canada." They contain the most seductive and brilliant picture of the happiness which attends future emigrants; they promise a land of Cocagne, whose rivers roll o'er sands of gold, with farmhouses already built, and swarms of young Canadian girls awaiting them with open arms. This little untruth, a common political hoax, is very pardonable. It is much better for the poor workmen of England, Scotland and Ireland, to clear, in the sweat of their brows, a wild domain on the great Canadian Lakes, than to rest famished or to become criminal in the streets of Glasgow, Birmingham or London.

Men have counted the victims of ancient conquerors; have they thought of those of modern industry, generations made meagre, intellects knotted and dulled, the canuts of Lyons, the crazy men of Birmingham. Since the year 1818, the weavers and hand-spinners of Scotland and Northern England petition incessantly for a means of gaining a living. Every year parliament treats them as Don Juan does M. Dimanche, puts them off until next year, and so the matter drops. Nevertheless, machine labor, gigantic rival of human toil, continues its progress, and crushes in its route all who resist. "Destroy the machines," cry some journals and pamphlets."Favor emigration," say wiser politicians; it is the only remedy for exuberant population, for unemployed arms, for overstocked professions. Found colonies in good situations, fertile, peaceable; the money consecrated to that will be placed at heavy interest; the more your colonists are satisfied, the more will others be attracted; the more will you

lighten the burden of the metropolis. These advices are excellent. Colonies are admirable exutoires, useful to the metropolis even at the moment that they separate from it. Unfortunately, France has only been able to discover for others a proper territory for colonization without herself founding colonies.

We will not return to that sad old malady of our France which seems always destined to sow the seed of progress, but never to reap. England, on the contrary, is essentially a colonizing country. She must continue that work which created the United States, and carry it on with redoubled energy, activity and perseverance. She is notified of this necessity by facts hideously distinct.

There are three standing armies of paupers, Irish cotters, Sussex laborers, and Glasgow weavers; and these three form a mass of thirty thousand men, without any means of existence, without knowing where to get daily bread. You see, say the parliamentary reports, troops of thirty or forty workmen, who go from one end of England to the other, looking for work, asking alms on the road, picked up by the police officers, and happy to get the black bread of the parish workhouse.

While the English political economists struggle against this population, the American of the United States, and the inhabitants of Canada demand loudly hands for the cultivation of the soil. "All the world," says a Canadian journal, "knows that population is wealth." Thus, for one country, that population is riches, which makes the poverty of another. And in these two axioms, placed in juxtaposition, one can see the future of Europe and America; here rivalries, unsatisfied ambitions in the midst of great industrial prosperity, the decline and the pressure of famished men, of which China

offers an example; there, continuous, rapid, onward, inevitable progress.

These emigrations, which should be favored by England and by France, augment and precipitate the progress of North America. It is not probable that the anglo-Canadian colonies, and the British possessions bordering on the United States, will long remain insensible to the near and contagious example of independence and self-government. When their cities shall have been built, their fields cleared, their forests thinned, their commercial relations established, they will separate, one by one, from the parent stock, and affiliate themselves to that formidable group of republics which borders the Atlantic, and is stretching towards the Pacific.

SECTION II.

POPULAR MOVEMENT IN FRANCE AND ENGLAND-EDUCATION OF THE MASSES.

The despair of old Europe, fatigued by labors, exhausted by pleasure, enervated by desire, manifests itself especially in England, France, and Germany. The chartist movements which have recently alarmed Great Britain, are but the powerless, yet mad aspiration after necessary well-being; the roar of the popular lion agitated in his den. In France, it is more mingled with self-love, envy, and jealous hatred; with our neighbors, there is more hunger, thirst and sorrow. insurrection of vanities is not less terrible than that of hunger. Here, and on the other side of the channel, the masses seek to employ their power. You cannot oppose the fact, nor strive against what exists. All good politics, worthy of the

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