CHAPTER I. COLONIZATION. THE real wealth of a nation does not consist in the richness and diversity of its natural products, the temperature of its climate, or the advantages of its geographical position; but in the numerical strength of its population, the aptitude of its people for labour, and the facilities. afforded for the exercise of their genius and industry. Without this, the richest regions of the earth are but as barren deserts, where man, called into being merely to find existence an incumbrance, lives, like the inferior animals, only to tax Nature with the incessant exigencies of his necessities and wants, without ingenuity or means in himself, or faculty exerted under direction, to contribute to her prolific tendencies, recruit her exhaustions, or increase the sum of his human happiness, by the practice of those arts conceived to multiply the objects of his comfort and enjoyment. Such care, however, is the mission of civilized man: to him Nature, through all her reigns, is fertile of pleasure and resource: the very elements he subjects to his use; and, from the vilest and rudest objects of creation, he extracts means and appliances, either necessary to the actual maintenance of his being, or contributive to the luxury of the senses. Before him deserts disappear, and nature beneath his hand puts on a new face; for everything on earth, being turned to his purpose, assumes particular value, and becomes matter of property; till agriculture, commerce, manufactures, chemistry, and every art and science connected with them, perpetually exerted in universal attempts to multiply fresh conceptions of invention or improvement, exhaust at last the most fanciful ingenuity of man; till, by ceaseless competition and over-production, every field of industry, genius, and enterprise, becomes glutted and impeded. Such a critical condition is invariably attended with superabundant population, and the consequent result of progressive prosperity, so inviting to life and favourable to existence, renders at last the original blessing of accumulating numbers perplexing to Governments and a burthen to the soil. In the infancy of States, every fresh birth, by adding a new member destined to contribute to the work of growing prosperity, however humble he may be in the sphere of his individual utility, is naturally regarded as a welcome accessory to the productive body or defensive force; but the time arrives at last when the consummation of institutions, and plenitude of welfare, renders even labour-that real wealth of communities-superabundant to the wants; and every new life becomes a charge burthensome to established resource, which, despite of every means that public government or private enterprize can devise, must, after the revolution of ages, inevitably become liable to limitation and ultimate obstruction. In the uncivilized condition of savage life, the denizen of the wild finds his allotted provision distributed for his use over the face of nature: the mountain and the valley, the forest and the plain, are a common estate, where the fruit and root, in the impartial bounty of Providence, are the property of all who have a mind to gather. Every tree is at the service of his tomahawk: every spot free to his selection for the site of his wigwam: his arrow is the charter of his chace, and the waters are his larder by right of ingenuity. The child of nature has to toil at the bidding of no master: his time and movements are independent of the will and caprice of others: he has to doff his cap to no conventional superiority; nor has he to vindicate his right to respect on the strength of adventitious privileges and fanciful assumptions. He has not to blush for the obscurity of his birth, the meanness of his attire, and poverty of his home; since all his fellow-men round, and above him, are alike subject to the same destinies. It is true that these advantages, provided in the primæval plan of nature, are accompanied by many distasteful conditions, when compared by civilized man with the supposed superiorities of happiness and accommodation he is born to enjoy. First, the savage is benighted in the darkness of brute ignorance, and degraded in the indulgence of barbarous propensities: he is exposed to the misery of imperfect shelter from the season's vicissitudes, and is destitute of a thousand comforts and conveniences indispensable to the inhabitants of cities. He is unprovided by governmental economy against the failure of nature's aliments, and is exposed to the scalping-knife of hostile tribes or to the fury of beasts of prey; while his thousand and one little interests are undefended by any system of law. He possesses nothing which can be called property; or, did he boast of such a possession, its tenure could only be temporary and insecure. He has not the benefit of science: he does not enjoy the luxury of arts; whilst he is ignorant of the pleasures of gentle intercourse with civilized fellows. Are all these advan tages in reality enjoyed by the bulk of society in a high state of civilization, to indemnify the common class for the privation of their free and equal rights to the bountiful provision which should be theirs, according to the original scheme of nature? No: for, after the arrival of society at a certain degree of civilized perfection, man, as a mere man, unpossessed of the conventional dignity of birth, property, and scholastic knowledge, deteriorates in importance and value to a state far beneath the unreclaimed savage. He has to crouch in the mortified sense of hopeless dependence and privation, under the endless arrogations and assumptions of hereditary opulence and privileged luxury, and to confound his misery and insignificance among the abject millions, who toil in the irksome exercise of routinary labour, with horny hand and sweating brow, for the scanty, precarious, and disputed morsel necessary to the bare existence of life. He has to conform, for no very apparent advantage to himself-but for the benefit and pleasure of others to all the artificial forms, relations and obligations, usages, proprieties, prejudices, wants, and dependencies, proper to civilized institutions to fetter his will and action, restrain his tastes, divert his inclinations, and subdue them to obedience under the authority of absolute laws, which oppose his natural bias at every turn. Gradually shut out from nature, and condemned, as it were, to a living death; hedged and walled off from every acre by the voice of exclusive proprietorship universally exclaiming-" This is mine, and that is mine"-he is doomed to languish in the cribbed alley, or the dark mews, penned in the cabin or workshop, boxed in the attic or stifled in the cellar, with countless multitudes of fellow miserables. : For voluntary submission to such a fate, at the expense |