Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/475

Rh for a time personally administered the colonies they led. When a genuine enthusiasm excites a whole people, the nobles share in it, and three hundred of the twelve hundred who formed the first expedition to Darien were of the best Scottish families, while some members of the second were Highland chieftains. Several baronets and sons of peers took part in colonizing New Zealand, and a baronet led the Jamieson raid. Only a few years ago an ancient English earldom threatened to become extinct in South Africa through miscegenation. 3. The great middle class, seat of the solid qualities in every country, was long the chief fountain of emigration. It alone, or it chiefly, had the means to emigrate, and the intellectual and moral energy to make the emigrant's life a success. "The immense majority of American families," Bancroft tells us, in both New England and the South, belonged to this class. Far the larger proportion of unassisted emigrants to British colonies during the present century has had the same origin. 4. Now that emigration is comparatively easy, the greater number of emigrants are artisans, laborers, and domestic servants, who thus assimilate colonies to the ratios of the mother countries.

V. Priestcraft did not emigrate, says Bancroft of the North American colonies generally. Yet, when a colonizing enthusiasm takes possession of a community, especially if the settlement is to be formed on church principles, clergymen often make great sacrifices to participate. The colonies of New England, Canterbury, and Otago were well supplied. A minister was sent out with the Darien colonists. In ordinary emigrations they are apt to be in defect. A bounty was offered in Virginia to immigrating clergymen. The hard country, the poor pay, the cavalier treatment, and the rough life deter even a "stickit minister." Those who succeed as emigrants are therefore of tough fiber, and possess the hardihood of character needed to hold their own with an untender race. As the colony develops, the more average members of the profession find their way out, and to a late stage in its history the majority in all the professions are of home birth or education.

The author of the Scarlet Letter ascribes the lack of physicians in New England to the undoubted materialism of the profession, which prevented them from sharing the impulse to emigrate. But the scarcity was not peculiar to the medical profession, nor was it confined to New England. Surgeons were as rare in French Canada, where "there was not a man who could set a bone." They are equally lacking in young colonies at the present day. The colonists are too few, too scattered, too poor, and too healthy to require or to Le able to pay for them. Many a colonial township has starved out a succession of would-be medical residents. Those who thrive