EMIGRATION WESTWARD. 



BY EDWARD EVERETT HALE. 



(In the Boston Commonwealth.) 



MR. SMYTHE'S presence in Boston brings up 

 again the eternally recurring questions which 

 connect themselves with emigration from the 

 old States to the new. 



Nothing surprises intelligent foreigners so much 

 as our ignorance, almost absolute, as to the statistics 

 of this emigration. A distinguished educator from 

 France, sent out by his own government, asked me 

 once how many teachers from Massachusetts and 

 from Connecticut were engaged in the Western 

 schools. I laughed and told him that nobody knew 

 in the world, or could guess. He said, in his broken 

 English, that this was a thing unheard-of; that here 

 were " two small provinces,' 1 as he called them, sup- 

 plying at that time nine-tenths of the teachers for the 

 rest of the country, and that nobody in America 

 knew that it was so or cared that it was so. 



George Holyoake spoke with the greatest earnest- 

 ness on the subject when he was in this country. He 

 said that every village in England was flooded with 

 advertisements of rival railways, offering their lands 

 to English emigrants. But he said there was no 

 official statement of any sort to which people could 

 be referred, by which they could judge how far the 

 statements in these blatant advertisements were true. 

 He said that the emigrant from England arrived at 

 the pier in America absolutely ignorant of the 

 country to which they came, and he said there was 

 nobody in America who cared to give him disinter- 

 ested information. So far as the personal conduct 

 of emigrants from the East to the West goes, the 

 arrangements of the Mormon Church are the only 

 organized arrangements. You can see, on a steamer 

 wharf sometimes, the agent of the Mormons, wait- 

 ing for a party which is coming from England ; he is 

 going to take them to Utah. But if a person is so 

 unfortunate that he is only a Christian, and not a 

 member of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, he 

 must just fight his way among a horde of leeches 

 who want to get all his money before he is out of the 

 sound of the waves of the sea. 



When emigration to the West began, as early as 

 1783, the leaders of the Eastern States were fright- 

 ened. There still exist old pamphlets, not to say old 

 caricatures, which ridicule the desire to go West. In 

 a dozen forms the old story is still told of the emi- 

 grant from a Massachusetts town, who went to Ohio 

 carrying with him a jug of molasses, and came back 

 boasting that he had sold his molasses for enough to 

 pay for the molasses and the jug. On the right hand 

 and on the left, every effort was made to persuade 

 our people that they had better stay here and not 

 trust themselves to the rich valleys of theScioto and 

 the Miami. Those who went and trusted themselves 

 there were perfectly indifferent as to what was said 

 to those who remained behind. And the caricature 

 and the phamphlet are now left to the dust of an- 

 tiquarian libraries, and only referred to as Mrs. Part- 

 ington's broom is referred to, with which she tried to 

 sweep back the waves of the sea. 



All the same, however, little or nothing is known 

 about the wave of emigration. De Tocqueville 

 studied the matter with care, and gave to us the 



146 



curious figure, which has been verified that the aver- 

 age flow of the wave, was, m his time, seventeen 

 miles in a year. A similar flow began from the 

 Pacific coast eastward, alter we took a foothold in 

 Oregon and California, and the' two waves have met 

 each other. 



There are people to-day who are as unwilling to 

 encourage emigration to the West from New England 

 as their grandfathers were. They are a little apt to 

 be the people who own tenement houses, ten stories 

 high, and would be glad to make them twenty stories 

 >high if they could get good rents for the nineteenth 

 and twentieth stories. They are people who are 

 living under the delusion that a city, because its 

 population is large, is prosperous and rich. But the 

 prophecies of these people, and the Partingtonism, 

 does not in the least affect the purpose of those peo- 

 ple who wish to emigrate. As Abraham Lincoln 

 would have said, those people who want to go want 

 to go, and those people who mean to go mean to go. 

 In point of fact, roughly speaking, two per cent, of 

 the population of the Seaboard States move west- 

 ward every year. It is a little curious, and it is satis- 

 factory for us in Massachusetts, to observe that the 

 attraction of Massachusetts to another set of people 

 is, in its way, as great as, in its way, the attraction of 

 the Western valleys. It would probably be fair to 

 say, that at this moment 280,000 persons born in 

 Massachusetts are living in other States of the Ameri- 

 can Union, and that 280,000 persons born in other 

 States are living in Massachusetts. The two fancies 

 about meet each other. The account is about as 

 broad as it is long. 



It is for the 40,000 people who are going to move 

 from Massachusetts westward this year that the per- 

 sons interested in the unoccupied lands of the West 

 propose to make arragements, for their convenient 

 and easy emigration. It is just as well to have 

 these people " personally conducted '' to the West as 

 it is have some delicate young lady who coughed 

 twice last Wednesday personally conducted to San 

 Diego by Messrs. Raymond & Whitcomb. It is 

 just as easy to arrange that their emigration shall be 

 comfortable and easy as it would be if they were all 

 Latter Day Saints. At the interesting meeting held 

 on Monday evening, the first Colony Club in Massa- 

 chusetts was formed, not to make any particular 

 colony for any particular place, but set on foot such 

 arrangements as shall tend to the comfort of the 

 forty thousand. The Colony Club proposes to collect 

 and circulate information on the subject of open-air 

 life in the West. It proposes some such mutual 

 assistance as has proved possible in the Chautauqua 

 circles and other great reading circles of the country. 

 It proposes the establishment of similar clubs in all 

 the larger centres of New England. And it cannot 

 be doubted that under prudent and wise management 

 a satisfactory result may be secured. 



To a certain extent, the indifference of the general 

 government towards interior emigration may be 

 atoned for by such arrangements as these clubs may 

 be able to make. 



