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rural festivals held in the vicinity of clear springs and under the shade of odoriferous trees. On the latter I shall dwell in some future letter at present I must conclude with the usual sentiments of attachment and regard.

LETTER IV,

The subject of emigration from Britain considered.. History of an emigrant farmer. Kentucky peopled by a puffing publication. Lord Selkirk's colonizations. District least pernicious for emigrants,

Pittsburg, November, 1806.

As the portrait which I gave you in my last, of this town and its vicinity, might dispose some minds on your side of the water to emigration, it will be but fair and honest for me to consider that subject rather minutely, and shew you how far such a measure would tend to their happiness or otherwise. For this purpose let us suppose an individual determined to abandon the land of his nativity, and to break the chain of early attachments and maturer friendships, to go-whither? To a country of which scarcely any but unfaithful delineators have written; to regions described by persons who meant to impose on the public, by giving lavish and flattering details of which they themselves had only heard. One place is said to be“a paradise, where man enjoys the felicities of the golden age;" and another is represented as a fit residence for gods." Alas! these are the reports either of travellers who conceive that they must not speak the truth, or perhaps of indigent writers who never were out of London. Such compositions, are a kind of romance, intended to amuse, not to instruct; to please, but convey no intelligence and this is the dangerous effect of an opinion, that the public taste would not endure a work destitute of false colouring and meritricious embellishments; and that an author adhering to the simplicity of truth, would be condemned as a gloomy pedant who represented nature in a dark disguise. To illustrate these observations, it may be useful to state a fact.

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Only a few years have elapsed since a gentleman farmer,

residing within three or four miles of Lewes in the county of Sussex, began to entertain unfavourable notions of his country; and to believe that he was a mere slave, subject to the caprice of an arbitrary government. Perhaps you will suppose that a course of unmerited adversity had reduced him to poverty and distress, and thus given, this unhappy turn to his thoughts: on the contrary, his farm was his own; it enabled him to support a large family, to en-joy the comforts and even luxuries of life, and the delight of performing acts of generosity among his relations and neighbours. Under what delusion then did he labour? That which arose from an extravagant admiration of the French revolution, and the French patriots! He extolled all that they did and trusted to all they said. They declared that the people of England were not free, but in a state of infamous servitude: he believed this; and to amend his wretched condition, resolved to emigrate. He fixed on America as his destination; and to obtain all the necessary information for this purpose, bought up every publication which professed to describe that extensive country. He had before read every one that abused and censured his + own; and even his children were familiar with Jefferson's flights on Independance, the blasphemies of Tom Paine and the political reveries of Priestley. Thus equipped, thus admirably prepared for the completion of his project,. Le sold his stock and all his possessions, and embarked, without any other regret than what he patriotically felt for the calamities and degeneracy of his countrymen.

You need not be told, that on leaving the land, and encountering storms and dangers of every kind, a variety. of recollections must have recurred to the minds of our emigrants, and torn their hearts with the anguish of recol-lected and endearing sympathies. Such must have been the state of their feelings till they arrived in sight of America, but these sensations were then diverted by a succession of new and unknown objects. They first saw land to the northeast of Portland,in the district of Maine; and then coasted along the shore to Boston in Massachusetts. During this period, the father was anxiously looking for that prospect of fields and villages, that general shew of improvement and abundance, which his reading had instructed him to expect; but what was his surprise when he found that he could observe nothing but immense forests, covering an

endless succession of mountains which penetrated to the interior of the country, and lost their summits in the clouds! He was not aware, that from the vast extent of America, the industry of man cannot for centuries effect a visible change in the general and primitive face which it bears. The improvements are but as specks scattered here and there, and can only be perceived by particular researches: the survey from a distance represents a continued immeasurable tract of woods, apparently occupied by beasts of prey, and incapable of affording accommodation to man.

This unexpected sight engaged and astonished him; nor were his reflections on it interrupted till he arrived in Boston harbour, where other scenes gave him fresh cause for wonder. A swarm of custom-officers were in an instant on board; and began their work of search, extortion, and pillage. Having escaped from these, and landed, he found himself surrounded by a number of persons who, withou any kind of ceremony, crowded on him with the most familiar and impertinent inquiries: such as why he left England, whether he intended to settle among them, what were his means, what line of life he meant to follow, &c. One of them could let him have a house and store, if he turned his thoughts to merchandize: another could supply. him, at a low price, with the workshop of a mechanic, a methodist-meeting, or a butcher's shop, if either of these articles would suit him. Some recommended him to become a land-jobber; and to buy of them a hundred thousand acres on the borders of the Genessee country, and on the banks of extensive rivers and sumptuous lakes. This speculation was opposed by others: who offered him the sale of a parcel of town-lots, from which, by building ou them, he could clear 500 per cent.; or if he had not means to build for the present, he could cultivate the lots as cabbage-gardens, clear the first cost in a few years, and sell the whole at an advanced price! Finding however that none of their advice had any effect, these sordid speculators gradually dispersed; forming different conjectures of the stranger's intention, and lamenting that he was not simple enough to be made their dupe.

At length he reached a tavern; where he had not been 'long before a succession of swindlers and impostors intruded on his privacy, asked him a new set of questions, and

harassed him with proposals varying according to the par ticular interests of the parties. If he had a desire to become a banker, he could purchase a share in a capital house or he might buy a land-lottery; take a contract for building a bridge; place his funds in a manufactory of weavers'-shuttles; buy up unpaid-for British goods, twenty per cent. under prime cost; sell them by auction, and then buy a patent for making improved fish-hooks, and cut iron nails. As he did not approve of any of these plans, he was fortunately left to his little family: but not till his intruders gave him to understand that they suspected him to be a poor fellow without either money or spirit; and who came among them to become a school-master, lawyer, parson, or doctor. "These professions," they added, " already abounded among them, but in the interior of the country he could not fail to succeed; and they hoped he would soon* remove to those parts, as people of his kind were hardly held in repute among them."

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When they were again alone, his wife and himself could no longer suppress their astonishment and horror. short hour had dispelled the reveries in which they had so long indulged; and changed the liberal, independent, amiable Americans, of whom they had read so much, into a race of impudent, selfish, sordid individuals, without either principle or common humanity. Still however he was not⭑ inclined to judge rashly of them; but deliberately to examine the country, and act from his own observations.

At last, after spending much of his time and property, his conclusions were these; that the high price of labour renders it impossible for a gentleman-farmer to make any thing of land there; that no man can succeed on a farm unless he himself attends the plough, and has a wife and chil dren capable of performing the other mean and hard work; that the market-prices are too low to defray the expense of hired labourers, and that one of his own flocks of sheep in England yielded a greater profit than any farm which he had examined or seen here. Taxes too, he found, were numerous and increasing; yet trade was unprotected, and persons and property were insecure. As to religion, hé saw it in some parts established by a rigid ecclesiastical tyranny, compelling him to go to church on a Sunday or pay a fine; and in others so much neglected and disregard

ed, that every house of worship was in a state of dilapidation and decay.

Unwilling to renounce the prejudice which had led him to prefer America to his own country, he travelled southward, passing through the malignant ordeals of the middle States through the burning fevers which annually claim their thousands; and depopulate the great towns of NewYork, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He did not, it is true, find these dreadful scourges prevailing in the southern States, but he soon learnt that they too were regularly visited by periodical diseases. Slavery also reigned here; and consequently tyranny, sloth, avarice, and licentiousness.

He had now visited the whole of settled America; and at length awoke from those dreams in which he had so long indulged, and which ruined a considerable part of his fortune. His present reflections indeed were sound and salutary they brought to his mind new ideas of his native land, and of its constitution. What he had seen in America, led him to recollect the undisturbed security and wealth which he once so eminently enjoyed at home. To change his own mild and paternal government, for the wild principles of the American federal system; to renounce the honour of being a British subject, for the degradation of becoming a citizen of such States; now appeared to him absurd and contemptible: he accordingly prepared with eagerness to return to his native home, and is at this moment the tenant on the farm which was originally his inheritance. And yet he is happy, because he now sees all the objects of his former discontent in a rational view. Tythes, which formerly excited his disgust and uneasiness, he now owns to be necessary (till some equivalent can be substituted in their stead) for the support of religious worship; the neglect of which, as he has strikingly seen in America, renders a country infamously licentious. Taxes he allows to be essential for securing public order, public wealth, and individual prosperity and happiness. He admits that commerce must be protected by a navy; and that foreign possessions, which supply that commerce, must be maintained by a standing army: and concludes that to expect riches and prosperity without taxes, is to expect the return of the fabulous golden age; a thing that may be wished even by the wise, but which fools themselves can never hope for. Such is this gentleman's history! You will ask me why

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