338 Mr Harvey on the Increase of the Population 
render the maintenance of a family difficult and distressing to 
the labourer, and contemplate the advantages which the western 
regions of America disclose, where the wages of industry are 
high, and where the real labourer enjoys the best fruits of the 
earth in abundance and peace, we may perceive at least some 
ground for presuming, that the effects of immigration have been 
great. In no antecedent state of the w r orld has so immense and 
so indefinite a theatre been opened for the increase of the human 
race, not only, it is to be hoped, in number, but also in wealth, 
happiness, and virtue. At the present moment, we can con- 
template a surface of fertile country upwards of 2000 miles in 
extent, reaching from the present remotest settlements to the 
shores of the Pacific Ocean, enjoying all the blessings of the tem- 
perate zone, intersected by innumerable streams, possessing the 
primitive and undecayed energies of nature, and capable of af- 
fording, for centuries to come, the best fruits of the earth in un- 
limited abundance. 
It is in the newly settled states that we have met with the 
largest rates of increase ; and there is no room for supposing, 
but that a large proportion of their inhabitants will acquire fixed 
and settled habits, and thus possess the means of calling into 
full and perfect exercise all the active principles of population. 
These considerations, joined to the farther influx of other settlers, 
must, in subsequent years, give a prodigious impulse to their 
numbers. Some portion of the inhabitants of these new states 
will, it is true, retain their migratory habits ; but this, so far 
from proving any check to the population, will rather be the 
means of increasing it more rapidly. On the uncertain frontier 
of the American territory, u where civilized gives place to sa- 
vage life,'” crowds of such adventurous emigrants resort, “ dis- 
pensing with the advantages, and exempted from all the re- 
straints, of social life. Here they act in the double capacity of 
cultivators and huntsmen, partly civilised, and partly savage, until, 
by the advance of new emigrants, they are gradually surround- 
ed with improvements on every side, and are at length brought 
within the pale of order and law. Tired of this controul, and 
anxious to resume their free and licentious habits, they dispose 
of their lands to emigrants of a more settled character, and again 
take their station on the verge of the desert, there to bear the 
