Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/103

Rh requiring passengers to be bonded in certain cases appears obvious on examining the history of emigration, and the unscrupulous conduct of European governments and cities in transferring to our country aged and decrepit paupers, and occasionally even criminals. Without this provision to arrest abuses so obviously calculated to demoralize the community and increase the burden of taxation, any change in the law would be impolitic. The admission of such persons would bring odium, however unmerited, upon the industrious and intelligent emigrant, and, as far as your Committee had the opportunity of consulting the opinions of citizens by adoption, they appeared strongly in favor of the proposed restriction."

On January 18, 1847, the Comptroller recommended to the Common Council that a further application be made to the Legislature for the passage of a law, vesting in the Mayor the power of commuting or bonding alien passengers. "As the enactment of this law," says the Comptroller, "will afford partial indemnity to the city, without drawing a dollar from the treasury of the State or imposing any additional burden upon the immigrants, it is believed that a very moderate degree of interest on the part of the City Delegation in the Legislature will serve to secure its passage."

By this time, public opinion had become aroused to the importance of the proposed changes. The subject was discussed in the Chamber of Commerce of New York, and the opposition to the insufficient measures suggested by the Common Council took a definite form early in the session of 1847, in a letter written by Robert B. Minturn, a distinguished merchant of New York, to Mr. Thurlow Weed, the influential editor of the Albany Evening Journal. Mr. Weed for two or three years previously had been doing what he could individually, and through the columns of the Journal, for the protection of the immigrants, whose sufferings he had daily occasion to witness at Albany, where the canal boat-runners were, if possible, still more hungry and rapacious than the boarding-house scalpers in New York.

In consequence of Mr. Minturn's letter, which first took a comprehensive view of the subject, Mr. Weed went to New York