[01] THE trees, as I write, have not yet begun to leaf,
nor even the blossoms to appear; yet, passing down the lower part of Broadway
these early days of
spring, one breasts a steady current of uncouthly dressed men and women, carrying
bundles and boxes and all manner of baggage. As the season advances, the human
current will increase; even in winter it will not wholly cease its flow. It
is the great gulf-stream of humanity which sets from Europe upon America —
the greatest migration of peoples since the world began. Other minor branches
has the stream. Into Boston and Philadelphia, into Portland, Quebec and Montreal,
into New Orleans, Galveston, San Francisco and Victoria, come offshoots of
the same current; and as it flows it draws increasing volume from wider sources.
Emigration to America has, since 1848, reduced the population of Ireland by
more than a third; but as Irish ability to feed the stream declines, English
emigration increases; the German outpour becomes so vast as to assume the first
proportions, and the millions of Italy, pressed by want as severe as that of
Ireland, begin to turn to the emigrant ship as did the Irish. In Castle Garden
one may see the garb and hear the speech of all European peoples. From the
fiords of Norway, from the plains of Russia and Hungary, from the mountains
of Wallachia, and from Mediterranean shores and islands, once the center of
classic civilization, the great current is fed. Every year increases the facility
of its flow. Year by year improvements in steam navigation are practically
reducing the distance between the two continents; year by year European railroads
are making it easier for interior populations to reach the seaboard, and the
telegraph, the newspaper, the schoolmaster and the cheap post are lessening
those objections of ignorance and sentiment to removal that are so strong with
people long rooted in one place. Yet, in spite of this great exodus, the population
of Europe, as a whole, is steadily increasing.
[02] And across the continent, from east to west, from the older to the newer
States, an even greater migration is going on. Our people emigrate more readily
than those of Europe, and increasing as European immigration is, it is yet
becoming a less and less important factor of our growth, as compared with the
natural increase of our population. At Chicago and St. Paul, Omaha and Kansas
City, the volume of the westward-moving current has increased, not diminished.
From what, so short a time ago, was the new West of unbroken prairie and native
forest, goes on, as children grow up, a constant migration to a newer West.
[03] This westward expansion of population has gone on steadily since the
first settlement of the Eastern shore. It has been the great distinguishing
feature in the conditions of our people. Without its possibility we would have
been in nothing what we are. Our higher standard of wages and of comfort and
of average intelligence, our superior self-reliance, energy, inventiveness,
adaptability and assimilative power, spring as directly from this possibility
of expansion as does our unprecedented growth. All that we are proud of in
national life and national character comes primarily from our background of
unused land. We are but transplanted Europeans, and, for that matter mostly
of the "inferior classes." It is not usually those whose position
is comfortable and whose prospects are bright who emigrate; it is those who
are pinched and dissatisfied, those to whom no prospect seems open. There are
heralds' colleges in Europe that drive a good business in providing a certain
class of Americans with pedigrees and coats of arms; but it is probably well
for this sort of self-esteem that the majority of us cannot truly trace our
ancestry very far. We had some Pilgrim Fathers, it is true; likewise some Quaker
fathers, and other sorts of fathers; yet the majority even of the early settlers
did not come to America for "freedom to worship God," but because
they were poor, dissatisfied, unsuccessful, or recklessly adventurous — many
because they were evicted, many to escape imprisonment, many because they were
kidnapped, many as self-sold bondsmen, as indentured apprentices, or mercenary
soldiers. It is the virtue of new soil, the freedom of opportunity given by
the possibility of expansion, that has here transmuted into wholesome human
growth material that, had it remained in Europe, might have been degraded and
dangerous, just as in Australia the same conditions have made respected and
self-respecting citizens out of the descendants of convicts, and even out of
convicts themselves.
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