who, unable to maintain themselves, or hindered from doing so by their own misdeeds, are thus a heavy burthen on the other millions, who, for the most part, find it very difficult to provide themselves with the necessaries of life, and the rapid growth of population makes the burthen and the difficulty greater every year. Philanthropists and statesmen, no less than the sufferers themselves, are seriously at fault for not duly considering the value of our colonies for what Lord Bacon called "the double commodity in the avoidance of people here, and the making use of them there." If the administrators of our poor laws, and the dispensers of private charity understood their duty they would do vastly more than they have hitherto done in lessening the load of domestic pauperism by means of emigration to colonies in which there is room and need for millions of fresh settlers.

Useless paupers, however, would be as useless in the colonies as they are at home. Men and women who have been rendered apathetic and witless by the degradation of poverty have small prospect of advancement in regions where everything depends upon capacity for hard work and readiness in using that capacity in any labour that circumstances require. And the same remark applies, with equal force, to those other paupers of a higher social grade, who, by training or natural deficiency, are unable to maintain their ground in the struggle for independence that arises in every sphere of occupation, from those of the field-labourer and the artizan to those of the merchant and the candidate for professional employment. In the colonies, even

OUR EMIGRATION-FIELDS.

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more than at home, none but those who have power and will to work can expect to make progress. But as every calling is overcrowded with such, it is eminently desirable, both in their own interests and in those of the nation, that their ranks should be thinned and the colonies should be aided by the transference of some of them to new scenes of enterprise. England can spare a goodly number of them, and is constantly breeding more than she herself can give work to, and the colonies require all they can receive, for generations to come, of immigrants who will have to toil as manfully as at home, but who may fairly expect far richer gains than they could expect from their toil at home, and who may derive an additional satisfaction in their good fortune by knowing that their gains involve no loss to their neighbours.

Each colony has its special needs and its special facilities for advancement; but in nearly all-—in all but the few that are already well supplied with an enterprising population-there is room for hard-working settlers of every grade. In the great emigrationfields of British North America and Australia, however, there is most, and for the present boundless, room for farm labourers and their employers, and for artizans and their directors. Where vast tracts of land wait only to be tilled, and to have their useless vegetation replaced by wholesome cultivation, where new roads and canals have to be constructed, and where, as the produce is multiplied, the towns require fresh building of houses, increased development of manufactories and augmentation of all the resources for rendering available and transmitting to near and

distant marts the fruit of agricultural and other labours, it is evident that all who can supply these demands will be most welcome and will profit most by their enterprise.

success.

That enterprise, if rightly directed, cannot fail of It must benefit the individuals who engage in it, and confer equal benefit on the countries that receive them and the country that sends them forth. The noblest outcome of English colonization appears in the vast empire of the United States of America. But offspring as noble are now growing, and whether they continue to own formal allegiance to their mother-country, or in the end become independent nationalities, they cannot fail to be of inestimable advantage to the little island that gave them birth. And no political divergence can break the bonds of Anglo-Saxon friendship, or retard the progress of that best endowed race of men which, emerging from its English cradle, promises to spread the civilizing influences of its birth over the fairest and broadest portions of both hemispheres, and, in spite any turmoils that may be incident to its development, to continue its good work

"Till the war-drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world."

APPENDIX.

I.-AREA AND POPULATION OF THE BRITISH
COLONIAL POSSESSIONS.

In

The following table is based upon the latest returns. some cases, where precise surveys and reckonings have not been made, the figures are only approximate. The last column shows the date of each census or estimate of the population.

II. OUR EMIGRATION-FIELDS.

The following notes respecting the immigration capacities and needs of our principal colonies are drawn chiefly from the "Colonization Circular" of Her Majesty's Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, published in July 1869.

The United States and the British North American and