berty which carried Mr. Fearon to America, that he declares, ' if he had been acquainted with this important object at an earlier period of his journey, he would have taken, individually, a very material concern in it.' He was now grown too familiar with the country, it seems, to expect any advantage from it.

6

The Seventh Report' contains only two pages of description, and they are dedicated to Baltimore-a city which we are told, and, we believe, truly, occupies the foremost rank in deadly animosity towards England.' We are not surprized at this; for the inhabitants are not merely democrats, but furious Jacobins. A spirit of hostility towards England, however, is but too prevalent throughout the United States,—a spirit which is industriously kept up by the Cobbetts, the Emmetts, the M'Nevins, the 'Shamrock Society,' and, above all, by the editors of newspapers, who are generally Scotch or Irish rebels, or felons who have defrauded the gallows of its due. That hatred, however, would seem most unreasonable on the part of the native Americans, since their ancestors owed every thing valuable among them to the parent state. It was with English capital, and under the immediate auspices and protection of England, that the wild and desert woods and swamps of North America were first reclaimed. Their first implements, their first machines, their first cattle, their fruits and grain, were all derived from England; their children grew up in prosperity, maintained and fostered by a liberal and indulgent parent, who saw, with heartfelt satisfaction, her offspring increase in strength and stature, and advance with firm and rapid steps towards maturity-this is what Mr. Fearon is not ashamed to call the tyranny of the mother-country. It is not therefore to the declaration of Independence (as he appears to think) that the present flourishing condition of the United States is to be attributed. They flourished and were happy while English colonies; they have continued to flourish since their separation, and, we may add, in proportion to their adherence to their original institutions, and to their connection with that nation to which they owe their birth.

Mr. Fearon's excursion terminates at this point; and it is not a little tantalizing for those who have accompanied him through the whole of his travels, and witnessed the greediness with which he seized upon every opportunity of traducing the character and conduct of our best and bravest officers, to be carelessly told, just as he is about to return to England, that he really knew little or nothing about them. My knowledge,' he says, of the details of the war was extremely limited when I first landed in America.'-p. 374. Had this ignorance operated to check the flippancy of his censure, it would have been no disparagement of his modesty. He now, however, investigates the facts,' and learns

'

learns, for the first time, (what every child in this country could have taught him before he left home,) that the American ships were not only larger and stronger than those opposed to them, but that they were fought, in a great measure, by British subjects.' p. 375.

*

The Eighth and last Report is chiefly occupied with criticisms on Birkbeck's Letters from Illinois,' and winds up with an opinion as to the description of British subjects who might be benefited by an exchange of country. The first class on his list are the extreme poor,' who, he says, instead of depending for subsistence upon charity soup, occasional parochial relief, and bowing with slavish submission to the tyrant of the poor-house,' would here have 'meat at least seven times in the week, and know no one who could make them afraid.' And this he writes from a city in which (as we learn from Mr. Bristed, p. 9.) one-seventh part of the population had subsisted on charity soup and private benevolence during the whole of the preceding winter! And this he writes too, with the perfect assurance that the 'extreme poor' who are thus to relieve themselves from slavery,' and 'to know no one who can make them afraid,' have no means of benefitting by an exchange of country, but by selling themselves to some brutal captain of a slave-ship, who will sell them in his turn to some more brutal planter, to flog for exercise or amusement.

His second class of persons, who might emigrate with probable advantage, are mechanics in branches of the first necessity; who, by prudence and economy, 'would advance their pecuniary interests though they might not enlarge their mental sphere of enjoyments.' To these he thinks he may add the small farmer, though he warns him to be prepared against very many privations, Alas! not a few small farmers' have already been induced to try their fortunes in the woods and swamps of the new Eden, but soon found, to their cost, that they did not, to use Mr. George Flower's phrase, 'transplant well'! As to farmers with a small capital of two or three thousand pounds or upwards, whom Mr. Birkbeck attempted to seduce as the most likely customers to purchase lots of his delightful prairie, we have their pleasing prospects depicted, and faithfully we doubt not, by a man to whom the very name of England is poison. For an English farmer, (says Cobbett in his Letter to Birkbeckt,') and more especially

an

See the accurate work of Mr. James on the Naval Transactions of the late war with America.

+We were not quite correct, it seems, in ascribing Mr. Birkbeck's throwing up his farm, and railing at the government, to the raising of his rent, and the fall of prices, He had no such plea, it appears, for his angry invective, having sold the remainder of his lease for £2000. His spleen, however, like his downward movements' from a carriage

VOL. XXI. NO. XLI.

L

an English farmer's wife, after crossing the sea, and travelling to the Illinois with the consciousness of having expended a third of their substance to purchase, as yet, nothing but sufferings; for such persons to boil their pot in the gypsy-fashion, to have a mere board to eat on, to drink whiskey or pure water, to sit and sleep under a shed far inferior to their English cow-pens, to have a mill at twenty miles distance, an apothecary's shop at a hundred, and a doctor no where; these, my dear Sir,' he affectionately exclaims, are not, to such people, "every-day evils of life."

The man of small fortune, who cares little about politics, to whom the comforts of England are perhaps in some degree essential, but who wishes to curtail his expenditure, would not act wisely by emigrating to America. Indeed, should such a man make the attempt, he would return as expeditiously as did a family who arrived at New York in the Pacific, on the 25th March, with the intention of continuing, but who took a passage back in the same vessel the following week ;-they went to America in the cabin, they departed from it in the steerage.'* p. 447.

And how many thousands would follow their example, if, having expended their little all on a passage in the steerage, they had not left themselves without the means of return! Mr. Fearon thus sums up the result of his observations.

In going to America then, I would say generally, the emigrant must expect to find—not an economical or cleanly people; not a social or generous people; not a people of enlarged ideas; not a people of riage to walking on foot, was not without a cause: not satisfied with the vast profits of so good a farm, he turned soap-boiler, by which he lost eight or ten thousand pounds. His landlord is said to have composed the following epigram on his fortune :

'Had you

ta'en less delight in political writing, Nor to vain speculations given scope,

You'd have paid me my rent,

Your time better spent,

And besides-wash'd your hands of the soap

Soap-boiling is not the only speculation of friend Morris which has turned out ill. He appears to have tried to do something in the female line, and to have taken out a young lady with his family, as a venture. This fair creature, soon after their arrival at the Wabash, asserted her natural claim to liberty, and revolted to Mr. Flower, who, having left his wife in England, very considerately took her to his bed ad interim. Mr. Birkbeck was very unaccountably nettled at this arrangement; and the friends now glare at each other across the swamp like two angry comets denouncing war and ruin.'

* This live-carriage, by the way, forms one of the most profitable branches of Ame rican commerce, and fully accounts for the zeal and profusion with which hand-bills containing Encouragement to Emigrants,' are printed and dispersed at every corner, together with lists of the publications of Sir Richard Philips and Dr. Senate. Mr. Fearon paid forty guineas for his passage (he was one of twenty) exclusive of wine, &c.' and the poor creatures in the steerage (of whom there were thirteen) twelve pounds each, and had to find themselves in every thing but water.'-p. 3. So that the Washington cleared, by passengers alone, in the homeward voyage, nearly a thousand pounds. A trifling per centage should probably be deducted from the amount for the agency of the Monthly Magazine, and one or two Sunday papers.

liberal

liberal opinions, or towards whom you can express your thoughts "free as air;" not a people friendly to the advocates of liberty in Europe; not a people who understand liberty from investigation and from principle; not a people who comprehend the meaning of the words "honour" and generosity." On the other hand, he will find a country pos sessed of the most enlightened civil and political advantages! a people reaping the full reward of their own labours, a people not paying tythes, and not subjected to heavy taxation without representation; a people with a small national debt; a people without spies and informers; a people without an enormous standing army.'--p. 441.

If this estimate be correct, why, it will naturally be asked, are not Mr. Fearon and the nine-and-thirty families who employed him, those men of upright and conscientious minds, to whose happiness civil and religious liberty is essential,' already in the country around which their most endeared political opinions are entwined'? Solely on the principle of loss and gain. If rent and clothing and provisions had been low, and wages and profits high, the friends of civil and religious liberty' would long ere this have taken their flight; but finding that their pecuniary condition would not thereby be improved, they have saving wisdom enough to remain in that country which their agent has vilified with no sparing hand.

The reader of Mr. Fearon's book cannot avoid being struck with the marked distinction uniformly drawn between the government and the people of America, the former of which is, on every occasion, most offensively bepraised at the expense of the latter, including even those who are in the immediate exercise of the functions of that government. We hear over and over again, that it is an easy, cheap, and reasonable government; and yet all the materials of it, all the members of the several departments of it, are accused of ignorance, vulgarity, brutality, and corruption. In one place the author is told, and believes, that almost every civil office in the state is bought and sold as commonly as the poor oppressed men of colour are in the neighbouring states, or as seats in the English House of Commons.' (p. 133.) He hears of jobs and peculations' at another (p. 15.); of bargaining for offices at a third (325.); and that the election of the President is a matter of juggle and intrigue.' Mr. Hulme (the friend of Cobbett) told him that the latter had declared that during the several years which he resided near the Treasury in London, he did not witness so much bribery, corruption, and place-hunting as he had seen in one week in Pennsylvania; and that the members of the legislature were engaged in little except smoking, drinking and gambling.' In all these opinions Mr. Hulme cordially

L 2

joined❜!

joined'! (p. 298.); and Mr. Fearon himself tells us that he became acquainted with facts in Washington which no man could have induced him to believe without personal observation.' Yet, after all this, and more-after repeated declarations that every election in America, from the President downwards, is carried by bribery, corruption or intrigue,-by a strange perversity of intellect, he dares to put such practices in competition with the administration of justice in England, and to call the government of America an enlightened and reasonable government!

A word more as to this cheapness, of which Mr. Fearon so frequently reminds his readers, and by which he means, we suppose, if he has any meaning at all, the low salaries of the public functionaries, and the moderate rate of taxation: they get a President, for instance, he says, at the rate of £5625 a year, which is found to procure able men, who have really talent and mind at their own disposal.' Indeed he has made the notable discovery that 'the statesman of America is perhaps of a superior race to those of Europe,'-none of your regularly trained' or 'family-born great men.' Of what materials then do these incomparable statesmen consist? for there is not a class of citizens throughout the United States that Mr. Fearon has spared-the answer is, of lawyers, the class which of all others he has loaded with the greatest share of his vituperation.

We doubt not that in England, as well as in America, we might have lawyers equally cheap. We might engage the splendid talents of Dr. Watson, for the foreign, and his learned colleague, Mr. Preston, for the home department, on still easier terms; and we might perhaps hire a sovereign, who would not scruple to ride down to the Parliament-house, booted and spurred; and hang the bridle of his horse on the railing, while he delivered his speech from the throne. But what would the nation gain by this? Would she sustain a more dignified character abroad? or would her safety, honour, and welfare be increased at home? Would the Russells, the Cavendishes, and the other great nobles and proprietors of the land,-would the manufacturer, the shop-keeper, and the mechanic consider their lives, their liberties, and their property more secure under a government thus cheaply administered, than, as it now stands, at an expense probably to each individual of about tenpence a year? To mete out a meagre subsistence to the public servants of a country,' Mr. Bristed says, ' and to calculate, to a single dollar, the exact amount of bodily and mental labour, for which a given salary is to be equivalent, is a theoretic illusion and a practical evil: in consequence of this marvellous improvement in the system of political economy,

there