Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 9).djvu/281

 {249} Want of employment is here viewed as a want of organization. With you it is represented to be an indication of an overpeopled country. The government of the United States does not attempt to get rid of its people, but, on the contrary, it welcomes the stranger who arrives on their shores. Your government pay for transporting their subjects, or encourage their removal by giving them lands gratis. Canada is wide enough to receive them, but its connection with England does not admit of a free trade. Multitudes of emigrants find their comforts as narrow as before, and remove into the United States. If facts of this sort indicate any thing, it is that no extent of country can compensate for mismanagement, or, in other words, a nation is more easily overstocked from impolicy than from want of soil.

The habits and institutions of the American people are peculiarly favourable to the adoption of manufacturing pursuits. They have no corporations with exclusive privileges, and no laws which enact any specific period of apprenticeship. Their well known spirit of enterprise, and the circumstance {250} of almost every man's being acquainted with handling the axe, the hammer, the saw, and the joiner's plane, must give a facility to the acquisition of mechanical labour. Besides, it is understood that a few weeks, or at farthest a few months, are enough to communicate the knowledge of most of those employments,

being exhibited on the poor's list, in the workhouse, or in the shape of inability to pay taxes. Crimes might be prevented, and better criteria obtained for discriminating between offences committed against law, and those perpetrated by law. A new light would be thrown on several branches of physical science, and particularly on agriculture, climate, and the healing art. It is but too easy to discover that the desideratum is not in unison with the affairs of the age, but it is probable that another Alfred, or a Lycurgus must arise before it can be remedied.—]
 * [Footnote: The approach of misery might frequently be anticipated and arrested without