MORRIS BIRKBECK, ESQ. 



the emigration of the tribe of grumblers, people who are petulant 

 and discontented under the every-day evils of life. Life has 

 its petty miseries in all situations and climates, to be mitigated 

 or cured by the continual efforts of an elastic spirit, or to be 

 borne, if incurable, with cheerful patience. But the peevish 

 emigrant is perpetually comparing the comforts he has quitted, 

 but never could enjoy, with the privations of his new allotment, 

 He overlooks the present good, and broods over the evil with 

 habitual perverseness : whilst in the recollection of the past, he 

 dwells on the good only. Such people are always bad associates, 

 but they are an especial nuisance in an infant colony.&quot; 



976. Give me leave to say, my dear Sir, that there is too much 

 asperity in this language, considering who were the objects of the 

 censure. Nor do you appear to me to afford, in this instance, a 

 very happy illustration of the absence of that peevishness, which 

 you perceive in others, and for the yielding to which you call them 

 a nuisance : an appellation much too harsh for the object and for 

 the occasion. If you, with all your elasticity of spirit, all your 

 ardour of pursuit, all your compensations of fortune in prospect, 

 and all your gratifications of fame in possession, cannot with 

 patience hear the wailings of some of your neighbours, into what 

 source are they to dip for the waters of content and good-humour ? 



977. It is no &quot; every-day evil &quot; that they have to bear. For an 

 English Farmer, and, more especially, an English Farmer s wife, 

 after crossing the sea and travelling to the Illinois, with the con 

 sciousness of having expended a third of their substance, to 

 purchase, as yet, nothing but sufferings ; for such persons to 

 boil their pot in the gipsy-fashion, to have a mere board to eat 

 on, to drink whisky or pure water, to sit and sleep under a shed far 

 inferior to their English cow-pens, to have a mill at twenty miles 

 distance, an apothecary s shop at a hundred, and a doctor no 

 where : these, my dear Sir, are not, to such people, &quot; every-day 

 &quot; evils of life.&quot; You, though in your little &quot; cabin,&quot; have your 

 books, you have your name circulating in the world, you have it 

 to be given, by and bye, to a city or a county, and, if you fail of 

 brilliant success, you have still a sufficiency of fortune to secure 

 you a safe retreat. Almost the whole of your neighbours must be 

 destitute of all these sources of comfort, hope, and consolation. 

 As they now are, their change is, and must be, for the worst ; 

 and, as to the future, besides the uncertainty attendant, every 

 where, on that which is to come, they ought to be excused, if they, 

 at their age, despair of seeing days as happy as those that they 

 have seen. 



978. It were much better for such people not to emigrate at all ; 

 for while they are sure to come into a state of some degree of 

 suffering, they leave behind them the chance of happy days ; and, 

 in my opinion, a certainty of such days. I think it next to im 

 possible for any man of tolerable information to believe, that the 

 present tyranny of the seat-owners can last another two years. 

 R 237 



