Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/187

Rh in benefit to the States in question. For, in that event, the share of New York would not be sufficient to meet the expense of caring for the disproportionately large number of sick and destitute who remain within her limits. Our State could not then, as she does now, act in the interest of the whole Union, by efficiently protecting all the immigrants on their arrival, and by preventing the spread of the diseases imported by them over the country at large, and this while deriving far less advantage from immigration than the Western States. Let those who compare the exaction of the commutation money by the Commissioners of Emigration of this State to the "Sound dues" formerly levied by Denmark, consider whether it would not be a far greater disadvantage for the Western States to have ship-fever, cholera, and other pestilential diseases carried among their people, than it is for them to do without the share of the commutation money which they claim. In 1846-47, more than twenty thousand immigrants died on the sea-voyage and immediately after landing, and thousands of others carried the germs of disease to the remotest corner of the land. It is the Commissioners of Emigration who have since prevented the spread of contagious diseases beyond their hospitals, and the East as well as the West ought to thank them for their disinterested care of the immigrants, and for the protection of the whole country from pestilential scourges.

It seems to me that those who wish to put an end to this beneficent work estimate the value of the immigrant by dollars and cents instead of by his productive power, and forget entirely that what the West wants is healthy men, capable of assisting actively in the development of her resources. This want is certainly better supplied under the present system than it would be were a change made. The same persons also seem to overlook entirely the beneficial influence exercised upon the immigrant by the protection against fraud and imposition of every kind afforded to him by the Commissioners. It is in this that benevolence and sympathy find their true sphere of action. The pecuniary losses of the immigrant from his own ignorance and inexperience, and from the rapacity of others, are to be deplored as much, and even more, on account of the community than on his own