Abbildungen der Seite
PDF
EPUB

warrant the effects they produce, such as the moon will not rise till after midnight-a fit time for deeds of darkness.' He often usurps a dignity which hardly belongs to him, and then again relapses into a degree of vulgarity quite inconsistent with his late dignity, and needless for any purpose of deception. His constant allusions to him, who alone knew him, but ill agree with his habitual caution; and the useless tricks that he plays, merely to astonish the natives, are often quite unaccountable; as where he calls to Dunwoodie to stand or die;' informs him that he wants nothing but his good opinion (which he certainly took a novel way of securing ;) warns him of some impending danger without explaining what; and finally concludes with the very superfluous manoeuvre of firing his musket in the air, throwing it at the feet of Dunwoodie, and vanishing in fumo.

But we must put a period to remarks which have already swelled our article to unlooked for dimensions. We have to thank our author for having demonstrated so entirely to our satisfaction, that an admirable topic for the romantic historian has grown out of the American Revolution; although we still think it a less prolific source than our earlier history. If he has not done all that man could do, he has at least exhibited powers from which we have every thing to hope. The Spy of the Neutral Ground is not the production of an ordinary mind, and we will not presume to set limits to that capacity of improvement, which the author of Precaution has evinced in this second attempt. He has the high praise, and will have, we may add, the future glory, of having struck into a new path-of having opened a mine of exhaustless wealthin a word, he has laid the foundations of American romance, and is really the first who has deserved the appellation of a distinguished American novel writer. Brown, who is beginning to attain a merited distinction abroad as well as at home, although his scenes are laid in America, cannot be said with truth to have produced an American novel. So far from exhibiting any thing of our native character and manners, his agents are not beings of this world; but those dark monsters of the imagination, which the will of the master may conjure up with an equal horror in the shadows of an American forest, or amidst the gloom of long galleries and vaulted aisles. His works have nothing but American topography about them. We recognize the names of places that are familar to us and New Series, No. 11.

36

years, in one infant colony, as I may call it, in an obscu nook of the new world; and this replied to and refuted, wi one voice, and with an evidence the most consenting and a tounding, by all ages and countries, by all sects of religion an forms of government, that were ever heard of or devised.'

But in order to ascertain whether the above remarks con tradict Mr Malthus' position, it is well for us to recollect pre cisely, what is the position he assumes. His words are, the 'population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twen ty-five years.' He does not affirm that such has actually bee the rate of increase at all times, and throughout the world and this Mr G. must have known, for a great part of Mr Mal thus' book is taken up by the inquiry into the nature of those checks, which in different parts of the world have kept down population so much below its natural level. It is not pretended by any one that there is any material difference in the natural fecundity of the human race in different countries; at least Mr G. is very strenuous in insisting that there is none. It would seem therefore neither unfair nor unphilosophical to take the ascertained rate of increase in any one country, as proof that the human race is capable of that rate of increase. The inquiry is, in what period will population, when unchecked, double itself. We look at the United States, where the usual checks have operated with less force than in any other part of the world, and we find the period there is twenty-five years. Now it would be of no consequence, if it could be proved that in every ather nation on earth the rate of increase is so slow, that it would require a hundred, or even a thousand years, to double the population. The fact is proved, that the human race can increase so fast as to double in a period of twenty-five years. It becomes, it is true, a very important question, why population does not increase as fast in other countries as in this. What are those checks which have in them operated with such terrible effect against the powerful tendency of human nature? Into this inquiry Mr M. has entered, and has executed his task in no hasty or superficial manner. Perhaps the larger, and by no means the least important, part of the essay on population, is devoted to this subject; and it would have been well for Mr G. (if he were able) to have pointed out any incorrectness in this part of his opponent's statements and arguments. But whilst he has not done this, his angry railings against Mr M. for assuming his

fact from the American censuses alone, are as absurd as they are undignified.

But Mr Godwin not merely denies that Mr Malthus was authorized in assuming the rate of increase in the United States, as that which is the natural rate of mankind. A point of much more importance with him is, to show that no such increase as our censuses indicate, has ever been the result of procreation alone. And here it is proper to remark that the correctness of our censuses is not called in question by either party. The dispute is merely about the cause of the increase of our numbers. Mr Malthus says it is a natural increase. Mr Godwin seriously asserts, and spends no small part of his work in attempting to prove that it is owing merely to emigrations from Europe, and particularly from Great Britain. The bare statement of such a proposition will excite surprise in this country; and our readers will feel some curiosity to learn by what sort of evidence a fact is proved, which to us, on this outside of the world,' (as our ancestors used to call it) is so novel.

[ocr errors]

The first proof is truly an exquisite one, though not more so than the point it is intended to establish. Mr Godwin has been told that between the years 1630 and 1640, twenty-one thousand two hundred British subjects were computed to have passed over to New England only. By looking into Anderson's history of commerce, he finds an enumeration of the ships cleared outward in 1663; and their tonnage was 142,900. In 1818, the tonnage of ships cleared outward was 3,072,409. He then states a question in the rule of three: if 142,900 tons yielded an emigration of 2,000 persons, what emigration will be yielded by 3,072,409 tons? And he thus finds that 43,000 persons emigrated in 1818. (p. 407.) To this argument we shall not attempt a reply. We never reason against the arithmetic; and so we pass to the next piece of evidence. It is an official account of the number which had emigrated from Ireland to North America, in the three years ending January 5th, 1819. The whole number is 35,633. But this includes the emigrations to the British dominions in America. It is known, that extraordinary inducements had, shortly before this period, been held out to the poorer classes of the United Kingdom to emigrate to the Canadas, by offering them at first, a free passage, a grant of land, implements of husbandry, and support for the first six months. These inducements were afterwards restricted to a grant of land; which

shows that numbers have been induced to avail themselves of the first offer. By an extract which Mr G. gives us of a paper published by the emigrant society of Quebec, dated 11th of October 1819, it appears that the number of emigrants arriving at that port, since the opening of the navigation for the present season, amounts to upwards of twelve thousand, which probably exceeds two thirds of the population of the city itself.' If the average of the preceding years was any thing near this, it will seem that but a small part of the 35,633 emigrants above mentioned came to the United States. Mr Godwin's next document is Niles' Weekly Register, from which he extracts the accounts of several extraordinary arrivals of emigrants at different ports of the United States. The first, dated August 16, 1817, states, that in the two preceding weeks there had arrived 2,512. The second, dated August 30, 1817, states, that in the two preceding weeks, 947 had arrived. October 25th of the same year, 204 passengers arrived at Boston, in the Mary Ann. For the week ending 31st August, 1818, 2,150 passengers, nearly the whole of whom were emigrants from Europe, arrived at the single port of New York.' And it is estimated that 6,000 arrived in the United States, in the two weeks preceding the sixth of September 1818. Thus much for Mr Niles, who probably little suspected that his industrious compilations were ever to furnish the ground-work of such extravagancies; and by way of climax, Mr Godwin informs us, that he finds in a letter written by Mr Cobbet, dated Long Island, August 14, 1819, the following assertion Within the last twelve months upwards of a hundred and fifty thousand have landed from England to settle here.' (p. 414.) In Mr Cobbet this is remarkably well, for probably the assertion is not more than fifteen times larger than the truth. He probably reasoned (if he reasoned at all on the subject) in the same manner that Mr G. would have his readers. In one or two weeks there arrived two or three thousand there are fifty-two weeks in a year, and so probatum est, there arrived a hundred and fifty thousand in the course of the year. We marvel that Mr G. did not adopt the argument before deduced by him from an estimate of the tonnage; and say if one ship brought 402 passengers, how many were brought by all the ships which arrived during the year? In this way he might have made up his desired number of emigrants; but in the mode he has adopted, though

:

not less erroneous than the one we suggest, he does not do it.

By our late census, it appears that our population has increased, during the last ten years, 2,385,831. Three of these ten years were passed in a state of war, which may safely be affirmed to have put an entire stop to immigration. During the remaining seven years, there ought then to have arrived, on an average, upwards of 340,000 emigrants a year :-considerably more than double the number which did arrive even upon the supposition, that the above statements of Mr Niles present us with the weekly average. But we all know that the average is nothing like the above numbers; that these were extraordinary arrivals, and for that reason were noticed by the newspapers. They were extraordinary cases in extraordinary years. In 1817 and 1818, the new situation of Europe threw thousands out of employment; and the consequence was, as we must all recollect, the arrival of several large bodies of emigrants in this country. But who besides Messrs Cobbet and Godwin ever thought of taking the wholesale newspaper accounts of cases like these, as ground work for calculating the number which arrive in the course of a year, and for every year? And yet it is upon the documents which we have given above, that Mr G. ventures the assertion,— The present population of the North American continent, with one exception, which will presently be mentioned, must have arisen from a direct transportation of the inhabitants of the Old World to the New ;' (p. 403,) and that but for this assistance, our population would be at a stand.

[ocr errors]

The single exception above alluded to we shall have occasion to notice hereafter, and we think there will be little difficulty in showing that it amounts to nothing. The above proposition is so utterly extravagant, that we would not waste the patience of our readers in a discussion of it, but that it has come from a writer of so much note as Mr. Godwin, and has attracted some attention in England. According to this hypothesis, in the course of every twenty-five years, a number of foreigners come here, and enrol themselves among our citizens, equal to the whole number of citizens at the commencement of the period. And what is truly astonishing is, that in all the stages of our increase, this number of foreigners has always been increasing in exact proportion to the number of citizens to which they were to be added. When, in 1749, we

« ZurückWeiter »