1 8 THE EM 10 H A TION Q UES TION. 



can be of anything, that many fortunes, both above and 

 beneath the soil, are only waiting to be gathered in 

 Canada. 



All attempts to force emigration have been attended 

 with failure. Emigration, whether as regards the immi- 

 grant himself or the new country in which he makes his 

 home, in order to be successful, must be spontaneous. 

 Emigration schemes that have been carried out for poli- 

 tical objects or for trade-union objects, or by interested 

 and unscrupulous emigration agents, whether of a Govern- 

 ment working out an emigration scheme for its own ends, 

 or of a laud company doing the same, have always been 

 attended with much privation and hardship on the part 

 of the immigrant, and have been, if not a positive loss to 

 the colony, at least a very doubtful advantage. The 

 reasons of this are obvious. In the first place, as regards 

 the immigrant himself; the very fact of his allowing 

 himself to be herded, as it were, like a sheep, and driven 

 off to a new pasture, shows that he lacks the very 

 qualities most essential to the success of the settler in 

 a country like Canada: I mean self-reliance and inde- 

 pendence of character. He prefers to lean upon some 

 one else for support, rather than to strike out a path for 

 himself. It is almost invariably the case that the man 

 who allows himself to be led out like a child or a domestic 

 animal to a new country, makes a grumbling, useless, 

 discontented settler, and is a burden rather than an 

 advantage to the colony to which he goes. 



The following is an example of forced emigration. In 

 the year 1861 a bad Old-World system of land tenure was 

 the means of forcing one hundred families of Acadians 



