When will the poor man realize
the fact that his comfort and happiness will result not from
workhouses and almshouses, hospitals and private charities, but
from that organized and efficient emigration, so long advocated
by the seer Carlyle? Only the crassest ignorance and the
listlessness born of misery and want prevent the able-bodied
pauper, the frozen-out mechanic, or the weary and ill-clad, the
over-worked and under-fed agricultural labourer, from quitting
the scenes of his purgatory, and from finding, scattered over
earth's surface, spots where he may enjoy a comparative paradise,
heightened by the memory of privations endured in the wretched
hole which he pleases to call his home. But nostalgia is a more
common disease than men suppose, and it affects none more
severely than those that are remarkable for their physical
powers. A national system of emigration, to be perfect, must not
be confined to solitary and individual hands, who, however
numerous, are ever pining for the past. The future will organize
the exodus of whole villages, which, like those of the Hebrides
in the last century, will bear with them to new worlds their
Lares and Penates, their wives, families, and friends, who will
lay out the church and the churchyard after the old fashion
familiar to their youth, and who will not forget the palaver-
house, vulgarly called pothouse or pub.
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