Page:The Irish Emigrants Guide.djvu/19

 €If we have endeavored to generalize our remarks in these pages, it was only with the design of making them useful to our countrymen, to whom they are addressed, and of rendering them the advice we believe best suited to their wants and circumstances in this country and at home; to give an aim and direction to their efforts when they have resolved on a step fraught with consequences of success or disappointment to their future career.

On the question of emigration, the adventurer should have a reasonable object in view, and never think of abandoning his native country, especially if there successful, without weighing well the difficulties, dangers, privations, and disappointments, that invariably await him in the land of his adoption. He should, in the first instance, calmly and dispassionately consider his present prospects with reference to his future—those family and friendly relationships, which confer positive enjoyments and advantages in every state of society—those substantial benefits derived from permanent and lucrative employments—his standing in society or reversionary expectations—that competence which secures the material and physical comforts of life and individual respectability, even under oppressive and absolute government—that credit or character which is, of itself, a stock in trade, and which time and test only can establish—besides, those thousand nameless attractions which, however ideal, constitute most of his pleasurable emotions, and many of his indispensable enjoyments. These matters are often undervalued at home, but they haunt the memory of the exile abroad with frequency and