EXCESS OF MALE EMIGRANTS. 461 



Thus, in three years, an excess of no less than 

 142,000 males entered the States from Europe, bringing 

 in as many extra competitors for the hands of the 

 native-born American females, who are intended only to 

 supply wives to the native-born American men. Then, 

 as the emigrants spread themselves over the land, the 

 unmarried females among them are picked up before 

 they have proceeded far from the sea-board ; and thus 

 the scarcity of the sex increases the farther westward 

 we go ; and the value at which they are estimated by 

 the men and by themselves increases, till, in the Far 

 West, they attain a famine price, and there we have 

 the paradise of women. 



The same state of things exists in our Australian 

 colonies, where the demand for female emigrants is 

 constant and excessive. 



Those persons, I believe, are wrong who see in the 

 relation of the sexes in the United States only an 

 imitation of French gallantry. It springs naturally 

 from the cause I have mentioned, which is therefore 

 the source, not only of the less retiring manners -of 

 the females, and their less strict submission to maternal 

 restraint, but of the vices complained of in the great 

 cities, and of the amalgamation which has been the 

 bugbear of the southern States. 



The same cause has operated in an opposite sense 

 among ourselves. The thousands of our native youth 

 who yearly migrate into the great cities, or emigrate to 

 our numerous colonies, or to the States, never to return, 

 leave behind a superfluity of the other sex. And thus, 

 as in the time of Medea, if a woman has not wherewithal 

 to buy a husband beauty, fortune, connections she 

 must wear out her unsought affections upon an unvalued 

 and perhaps laborious life. Bence the difference which 

 strikes most, and most immediately, an American female 

 when she leaves her own country and travels in Great 



