Page:Immigration and the Commissioners of Emigration of the state of New York.djvu/26

12 week, and six months for each month of absence. If the master did not want to keep his servant, he could sell him for the unexpired time of his term of servitude. It was a daily occurrence that whole families were separated for ever. In short, the whole system was utterly vicious and little better than slavery. It was only slavery for a term of years, but in all other respects just as cruel and iniquitous as that form of bondage.

This mode of making the immigrant pay his passage died out in the beginning of the nineteenth century. The last sales of passengers are reported in 1818 and 1819 in Philadelphia. We do not hear of indented servants after 1819, when immigration began to consist of a much better and well-to-do class of people, and the United States first intervened in behalf of this important economic interest.

From 1775 till 1815 immigration had been very slim, partly on account of the American Revolution, and partly on account of the wars ending with the overthrow of Napoleon I. In 1818, Dr. Adam Seybert, member of the House of Representatives from Pennsylvania, in his valuable "Statistical Annals of the United States" (pp. 28 and 29), wrote to the following effect: "Though we admit that ten thousand foreigners may have arrived in the United States in 1794, we cannot allow that an equal number arrived in any preceding or subsequent year, until 1817." Samuel Blodget, a very accurate statistician, wrote, in 1806, that, from the best records and estimates then attainable, the immigrants arriving between 1784 and 1794 did not average more than 4,000 per annum. Seybert assumes that 6,000 persons arrived in the United States from foreign countries in each year from 1790 to 1810. Both averages, however, seem to be too large; 3,000 for the first, 4,000 for the second period named is a very liberal estimate.

The difficulty experienced in disposing of property at satisfactory prices prevented many from leaving the Old World immediately after the close of the Napoleonic wars. But the great famine of 1816 and 1817 drove several thousands over the ocean. Here it may be stated that, from that time forward, the material and moral causes of immigration, above alluded to, regularly governed the numerical proportions of the influx of Europeans into the