INFLUENCE OF NEW ENGLAND. 217 



their ministers of various persuasions, tlieir newspaper 

 editors, tlieir bankers, their merchants, and their pedlars. 

 All the professions and influential positions are filled up 

 by them. They are the movers in all the public mea- 

 sures that are taken in the organisation of State govern- 

 ments, and the establishment of county institutions; 

 and they occupy most of the legislative, executive, and 

 other official situations, by means of which the State 

 affairs are at first carried on. Thus the west presents 

 an inviting field to the ambitious spirits of the east ; 

 and through their means the genius and institutions of 

 the New England States are transplanted and diffused, 

 and determine, in a great measure, those of the more 

 westerly portions of the Union. 



Near Eochester we passed one of the emigrant trains 

 which every day proceed from Albany and Troy to 

 Buffalo, on their way to the Far West. There were 

 women and children and men of all ages, and the ragged 

 and lively, though often squalid-looking Irish, were 

 mixed up wath the more decently clad and graver-looking 

 English, Scotch, and Germans. The fare from New 

 York to Albany by water, and thence to Buffalo by 

 railway, is five dollars a-head, though the poor strangers 

 are liable to much imposition in New York on the part 

 of a set of men called runners^ who waylay them on 

 landing, and profess to give them information, with the 

 view only of cheating them of their money. Much pains 

 has been taken, however, by the State Emigration Com- 

 missioners in New York, with the view of preventing 

 such imposition. It is made unlawful for a tavern or 

 lodging-house keeper to detain the luggage of an emigrant 

 for any debts he may contract ; persons are appointed 

 to give information to those who land; and were ordinary 

 prudence to be exercised by European emigrants, very 

 much less opportunity for fraud would be afforded to the 

 swarms of heartless wretches who, in proportion to the 



