Settlements.

I entertain no doubt but that landed proprietors could establish in the North-Western States of the American Union, "special" colonies for the settlement of their own surplus population in a way "that would ultimately refund the whole expense incurred" for the class of emigrants indicated in your note; that is, labouring families who are absolutely indigent, and the small farming class who possess a capital of £20 or £30.

In order to speak with clearness upon this subject, I must first give you some general account of the country in which I would contemplate the formation of your settlements. The country I have in view is the country bordering upon Lake Michigan: that is, the western part of the State of Michigan lying on the east side of that lake, the north part of the state of Illinois lying on the south side of the lake, and the territory of Wisconsin, lying on the west side of the lake. A very large proportion of the lands in the regions I have just named consists of Prairie land (that is, open meadows without any timber,) interspersed with timbered lands; and lands covered with thinly scattered timber, principally oak, which latter lands are called "Oak-Openings." Old country men on their first arrival in America are very awkward and ineffective in using the axe; and save in very rare cases, never become as expert at it as the natives of the new countries. They are therefore very badly adapted upon their first introduction to America, to enter upon heavily timbered lands and commence the hewing of farms out of the dense forest. It is true they learn to do tolerably well in time; and if you would carry them out, place them even upon heavily timbered farms, giving them a year's provision and all the other necessaries for starting, they could get along and do very well for themselves; but they would get along so slowly that if you had to require repayment of the outlay you had incurred upon them the debt would be stale and obsolete, and therefore difficult, nay, impossible to collect, before they had acquired the ability to commence the repayment of it. The advantage then of a country of prairie and of oak-openings for a settlement consisting of old country men (and especially when poor people, the expense of whose passage out you must pay, are to be settled and they are expected to repay the outlay incurred in settling them,) is obvious.

I wish to observe that besides prairie and oak-opening there is timbered land of all various degrees of density, from lightly timbered to the heaviest timbered; and just in proportion as the timber is light or heavy, so is the task of clearing it easy or difficult—tolerably suited to men fresh from the old country, or utterly unfit for them.

The leading characteristics of the Prairie, the Oak-Opening, and the Timbered Lands may be stated as follows:—

The Prairies are open meadows, sometimes quite level, some- page 17 times rolling in gentle undulations. They are covered with a growth of coarse grass, which affords a good pasture to the cattle of the settler at once upon his arrival, and—in the hollows and lower grounds—very heavy though coarse meadow; so that lie has summer food for his cattle without any trouble, and winter provender without any more ado than to cut it. The prairie grass, though coarse, is so grateful to cattle, and so nutritious, especially in the early part of summer when it is soft and succulent, that I have seen at Chicago beef wholly fed upon the natural prairie as fat as the best beef in our own markets; indeed, Chicago beef is becoming proverbial for its excellence. Large flocks of sheep also are now fed upon the prairies. There are some breeds of hogs, too, one especially, called "Irish graziers," which—as store hogs—thrive admirably on this grass. The advantages of such a country for provisioning your settlers are obvious. The prairie, when broken up, produces the most luxuriant crops of all kinds—wheat, oats, Indian corn, potatoes, &c. Almost the only drawback upon the prairie is this—hat after being closely pastured for a time (which cannot be however until the country is pretty thickly settled, and the stock very numerous), the prairie grass runs out, leaving the soil comparatively bare of grass; and the upland prairie is not easily brought to give a good close growth of the finer cultivated grasses to last permanently in either meadow or pasture. This defect, however, is of very secondary importance to the new settler; as until the country comes to be thickly settled, he has abundance of pasture and meadow on the uncultivated prairie in his neighbourhood, and the stalks and leaves of the Indian corn crop supply a great quantity of very superior winter fodder—besides that the low-lying prairie nukes very fine permanent grass and meadow land. To prepare the Prairie for the production of crops, it only needs to be plougled. This is done with a very large plough, called a breaking plough, hat turns over a furrow-slice of from twenty to thirty inches wide. The plough is drawn by three or four yoke of good oxen. Such a team ploughs from one and a-half to two English acres per day. Tow new settlers are able to furnish team enough to break up their own land, and accordingly settlers generally hire this work to be done for them. There are persons, particularly in the southern parts of Illinois, who make it a regular business to have a great number of oxen to break up land for hire. They will come up north one, two, and three hundred miles to take jobs of breaking. Their cattle, while travelling or working, have no other support than the grass of the prairie. The price for breaking prairie is pretty uniformly from one and a-half to two dollars per English acre. The prairie should be broken up while the grass is still succulent, so that when the sod is turned over, it will heat and rot well. Settlers generally wish to have their breaking finished by the 10th of June, as after that season there is danger that the weather may set in dry, and the grass become hard and wiry, so that the sod will not rot well through the whole year afterwards. But in wet summers the breaking goes on with advantage frequently to the middle of August, and it may generally go on to the middle of July. When the breaking is done in good time, the sod heats and rots thoroughly. page 18 The laud thus broken in the summer is sown with wheat in the autumn (sometimes having been ploughed a second time, sometimes not). The crop from that sowing is likely to be as good a crop as any that the land will ever yield; and the soil thenceforth is as mellow and as easily tilled as the finest garden ground. It is an ordinary day's work for a pair of horses to plough two English acres of this land after it has been once "broken;" if pushed, they will do much more. Thus easy is the process of subduing and of cultivating the prairie. You may judge then how rapidly the settler extends his fields and spreads his crops over such lands. But a prairie farm needs to have some timbered land attached to it, either forming a part of the farm or lying within a few miles of it. The settler needs timber for building his log-house—he needs timber for fire-wood—he needs timber for fencing his land. This timber must sometimes be hauled from a considerable distance. The prairie farmer is not very badly off who has his timber within two or three miles of him.

You will observe that there is a great deal of the work of cattle connected with the making and the occupation of a prairie farm: a heavy team of cattle is needed to break it up; and unless it be very favourably situated, immediately contiguous or adjacent to woodland, house logs, fire-wood, and fencing timber have all to be hauled from a distance of probably some miles. This should be kept in mind, in order to strike a fair balance in your comparative estimate between prairie and timbered land, as to the advantages they respectively offer for a settlement.

This rapid view of the characteristics of the prairie country would be very imperfect if I did not add that, for nine or ten months of the year the roads over the prairies are excellent, and this with scarcely any making. Every one is aware of the excellence of the roads in North America during the winter when they are covered with snow; but the roads over the prairies are excellent also in the summer; in fact at all times when they are dry—and they are dry, I may say, throughout the whole spring, summer, and autumn, except for two or three weeks in early spring, and two or three weeks in late autumn. Not that rain does not fall copiously in summer, but it falls—not as in this climate, in continuous drizzles —but for the most part in heavy bursts of thunder-showers. These showers last for a few hours; the water which thus falls for a great part runs off the beaten roads; and for the rest, a few hours', certainly, a day's, hot sun dries it up and restores the roads to their usual condition. This ready drying-up cannot take place in the timbered country, where the roads are covered in from sun and air by an impenetrable forest. For the carrying of produce these roads are, when dry, almost as good as Macadamised roads; and for rapid travelling in a light vehicle, they are better, because they are less jarring to the vehicle, and they are easy and springy to the horse's foot. They are thus good in the new prairie country without any trouble of making, save to rudely bridge over the running streams (with timber), and to ditch the low spots, raising the road towards the centre. This last operation is performed with a plough and a horse-scraper. These roads are so good, that one horse with a four- page 19 wheeled gig, (called in America a "buggy,") carrying one or two persons, will travel over them forty or fifty miles a day, as nothing more than a fair rate of travelling for, say, a week running. For a single day a good horse may be pushed sixty or seventy miles over them. A pair of horses will take a load of, say, twenty-five hundred weight about thirty-five or thirty-seven miles a-day for a week running, as about the ordinary rate of teaming. The consequence of these excellent roads (and needing little or no making), is, that in the newly-settled prairie country, settlers within twenty miles of each other are nearer neighbours than settlers within three or four miles of each other in a newly-settled timbered country; and one hundred miles to market is as practicable a distance over prairie roads as thirty or thirty-five miles over such roads as are commonly found in timbered countries but recently opened up.

The Oak-Openings are lauds covered with a thinly scattered growth of small oak trees. They are very easily cleared of their timber, of which they furnish on each farm not much more than the settler requires for building his log-buildings, for fire-wood, and for fencing. They are more difficult to plough for the first time than the prairie, because the plough has to cut the roots of brushwood which grows among the scattered trees, but once broken up they are very easily tilled, being generally a sandy soil. They give the very best quality of wheat, and good crops of all kind, but without the use of plaster of Paris (gypsum) it is very difficult to get any grass (whether meadow or pasture) at all from them. The new settler however does not suffer much from this deficiency, as there are always low marshy grounds to be found at no great distance, and these are very grassy. In the oak-opening country the roads are good for the same reason that they are good in the prairie country—the sun and air have free access to them.

The Timbered Lands, once they are cleared, are not only good for cultivated crops, but are also excellent grass lands, yielding both meadow and pasture of superior quality; so that the settler may have his rich meadow and grazing lands snug within the fences of his home farm. They are also generally better watered than the other lands; but the labour of clearing them is immense. Lands that are heavily timbered cost ten dollars an acre to clear, and some lands may cost twelve or fifteen dollars—labour being, say, at a dollar a day. The timber so perfectly shades the earth that neither grass nor brushwood grows under it, and consequently when the timber is cut down and burnt away it is not always necessary even to plough for the first crop, but the seed may be sown at once on the ground and covered in with the harrow. In timbered lands the settler of course has his building logs, his fencing timber, and his fire-wood upon the spot without hauling from a distance. You will observe then that in timbered land the settler, although very slowly and laboriously, creates almost every thing for himself with his axe, needing the help of cattle less than in cither prairie or oak-openings. This is an important point, to which I may draw your attention again. There is another fact of the first importance, viz., that timbered lands (and these not very heavily timbered), being less page 20 run upon by settlers than the prairies and the oak-openings, may still be had at government price, so much more favourably situated for a market than either prairie or oak-openings as possibly to justify, under certain circumstances, the choosing such lands for your settlement. The roads through heavily-timbered lands are made at an enormous expense, and even after great outlay are at first all but impassable, and this nearly throughout the whole year; they are obstructed with stumps and roots, and the sun and air having no action on them, they are at first always deep with mire and broken into mud holes.

Of all these kinds of land it is plain that to an old country man prairie is the best suited and the most attractive. Any quantity of prairie land may be broken up and taken into cultivation at an inconsiderable expense—6s. or 8s. British per English acre—an expense no greater than it requires to turn our own pasture or meadow lauds to tillage. Once broken up the land is tilled with an ease that is quite surprising to the old country man, so mellow and friable is it. But the great charm of its after-culture is, that it is as free and unencumbered from that grievous eyesore and great discouragement and perplexity to old country farmers in America, stumps, as if it had been familiar with the plough for centuries. Passing through the newest prairie country the finished style of the tillage presents to you everywhere the aspect of English farming. The farms are large and ample; the fields are regular, clean, and smooth; the plough furrows run a quarter or half a mile in length (the length of the forty or the eighty acre lot) as straight as an arrow flight. Cultivation extends itself so rapidly that even the sweep of the cradle-scythe is unable to cope with the great breadth of the harvests, and reaping machines have come into general use; nor after the first few years does any one think of threshing out his great crops of grain otherwise than with the threshing machine. The whole aspect of the newly-settled prairie country is in strong contrast with that of the newly-settled timbered country. In the one you have spacious fields, clean and perfect tillage, with an open country and excellent roads, to see where you will, and to go where you will. In the timbered land, on the contrary, you have small irregular fields full of unsightly stumps and still encumbered with numerous heavy logs, not giving straight passage to the plough in any direction for twenty yards together, closely walled in with walls of massive forest that seem to bid defiance to further progress; the whole presenting to the eye a most cheerless aspect of painful labour, choked and overwhelmed with the difficulties of the task it has undertaken. The roads are indescribably bad, closed in on either side, and arched overhead with forest which excludes both sun and air. Even when the stumps have been with infinite labour and enormous expense dug out, these roads are one mass of deep tenacious mud, varied with sloughs and waterholes, and this even after considerable lapses of dry weather; the water cannot sink, for the subsoil is a stiff clay, poached by the feet of cattle and the wheels of vehicles; it cannot dry off, for neither the sun nor air can reach it. After some years, indeed, when the timber is cleared away at either side, the face of things is altered, and then these clay roads of the page 21 timbered country, opened to the sun and air, are in the dry sunnier weather of America excellent and pleasant roads to travel on; but such as I have described they continue for many, very many, years after the first settlement. You may believe, then, that the contrast between the newly-settled prairie country and the newly-settled timbered country is immense; and in fact, when the traveller has passed through the belts of timbered country that generally margin the great lakes for twenty or thirty miles in depth, and breaks upon the open prairie or oak-opening country, the change is as if he had suddenly leaped, in time and the progress of civilization, from the middle of one century to the middle of the century succeeding it.

There is, however, one leading inducement that might, under some circumstances, determine you to give a preference to timbered land. I have glanced at it above; I will state it here more particularly. It is this:—The prairie lands and the oak-opening lands being so evidently the more desirable for new settlers, have been much more run upon than the timbered lands; and the consequence is, that timbered lands, and some of them too not to say heavily timbered, are neglected and left behind in very desirable situations, while prairie lands and oak-openings for forty or fifty miles behind them and farther from the lake, have been eagerly bought up. Thus it will sometimes happen that timbered lands at government price may offer so near to a good market as to make it matter well worthy of consideration whether you should not choose such lands for your settlement, especially if they can be had, as I have said, not heavily timbered.

Still the prairie lands, or the oak-opening lands, are evidently the lands for old country men, even where they have to be taken at some circumstances of disadvantage, unless indeed the disparity of circumstances be quite overwhelming.

Prairie lands with sufficient timbered land in their neighbourhood to meet the wants of the settler can still be had at the government price of one and a quarter dollar an acre, at distances from Lake Michigan of from fifty to eighty miles, with roads leading to the lake ports for the most part through a prairie and oak-opening country, and for the rest through a timbered country pretty well settled and opened. Any quantity of prairie only can still be had within thirty or thirty-five miles of the city of Chicago (a port on the lake) at the government price, but without timbered land. The prairies are very large there, and timbered land is scarce, having long since been bought up by speculators; but these speculators will sell their timbered land at from four to seven dollars per acre, so that you could procure your large tracts of farming lands in this favourable situation at the government price, and the comparatively small quantity of timbered land that you would require to have attached to it at the advanced price I have named. To procure in large quantities, such as you would need for a settlement, prairie lands with a sufficiency of timbered land attached to them, all at the government price, you must go from sixty to eighty miles from the lake. Timbered land you could still procure at the government price in any quantity you need desire in either Michigan or Wisconsin, at distances of ten, fifteen, and twenty miles from the lake—or from page 22 ports upon navigable rivers running into the lake—and land might be selected that was not so heavily timbered as to preclude a tolerable progress even among old country settlers.

Oak-openings may be had under much the same circumstances of distance from the lake ports as prairie land with timbered land attached.

Such is the choice of land that would be open to you in the United States.

Having made this explanation I now come to your question—could self-paying settlements be established for the class of emigrants indicated in your letter in a way that would ultimately refund the whole expense incurred?

You say your emigrants would, some of them, be wholly destitute, while others would possess £20 or £30 of capital. I take it that those who would possess no capital would form the majority of your emigrants, and that any scheme you would adopt must therefore have this class principally in view. I also take it for granted, that those who would possess so large an amount of capital as to be able to pay the whole of their own expenses of conveyance to your settlement would be but a small proportion of the whole. All would, of course, belong to a hardworking class, used to farm labour.

Your emigrants, then, could be very conveniently divided into three classes:—First, those who could pay the whole of their own expenses to your place of settlement; £30 would do this for a small family, £42 for quite a large one. Secondly, those who could pay about half their own expenses to your place of settlement; £15 would do this for a small family, £21 for quite a large one. And thirdly, those who could pay no part of their own expenses, but would require that you should pay all.

The tiling you desire, could, I am confident, be accomplished for all the three classes, but it should be by adopting a very different arrangement with each.

Now in dealing with these different classes of emigrants you will meet a difficulty at the outset. If you take out any parties who have no means, and whose whole expense of passage, &c., you must therefore bear, (and your emigrants will consist mainly of this class,) those who have means will deny that they have them, in order that they too may be taken out at your cost, and you will soon find your whole emigration reduced to one class—those who have nothing, or profess to have nothing. The remedy for this seems obvious enough—that you should give some superior advantages to those who will pay their own passage out, and proportionate advantages to those who will pay a part of their own passage. But these advantages will cost you money, and consequently you will find yourself involved in this anomaly, that it will cost you on the whole about as much to establish those who pay their own passage out as those whose whole expenses you bear from the beginning. This anomaly I believe you will have to submit to; but you will complain less of this necessity for establishing a certain class of your emigrants in rather a superior way, when you consider the matter a little. It is true, that if you had to deal only with that page 23 class of emigrants who could pay all their own expenses of conveyance to your place of location, you might establish them with a trifling outfit, and at a small cost, leaving them to gather strength themselves, and not pressing them for early repayments of the advances you would make for them. A given amount of capital would in this way cover at the outset a much larger number of settlers. But if you established all your settlers in a very poor way, they would not only have to endure many hardships but in order to get on at all they would be called upon to make numerous shifts. Of these shifts old country people freshly arrived are totally ignorant. They would have to learn them as they would have to make them, and would therefore find them infinitely painful, perplexing, and harassing. Your emigration would thus be greatly discouraged, and it is not at all unlikely that you would find it stop up pretty much where it had commenced—the accounts sent home by your first settlers would be so coloured with disappointment and despondency. Perhaps after all, therefore, you will account it rather fortunate that circumstances should have indicated to you a particular class of your settlers whom it will be expedient and just that you should start with greater advantages than the rest. The condition of these settlers will give its character to your settlement, and by the accounts received from them the opinions entertained of your settlement by intending emigrants at home will be regulated. If the other settlers are slower to prosper it will be understood that they arrived out in your debt for their passage, and that they cannot be expected all at once to overtake those who went out at their own expense. Other advantages also would arise from the presence of this better class of settlers which I will speak of more at large again.

The general outline of the plan that I would suggest would be this: To move out your emigrants, not all at once, but gradually, year by year, through several years, say seven or eight years. To purchase, the first year, a large tract of prairie, with its due proportion of timbered land, in quantity perhaps twice as much as you would need for the immediate occupation of your emigrants of the first and second years, and afterwards to make new purchases as you Blight need them. To settle your emigrant families each upon, say, forty acres of land, which you would give them at the same price that you paid for it yourself, and to reserve the adjoining forty acres, with a right to the emigrant to purchase it at any time within, say three years, at a fixed and reasonable advance in price. To break up, or help to break up, a quantity of land for each of your emigrant families, and do such other work for them as they could not advantageously do for themselves. To give them such assistance towards building their log-houses (sawed timber, shingles, glass, carpenters' work, &c.,) as it would not be within their own power to procure. To supply them with a plough, working cattle, a cow, pigs, a few sheep, seed, and provisions for a year. To charge them with all your expenditure, and a moderate interest on it. To require this debt to be repaid to you in a fixed number of yearly instalments—four, or at most five, yearly instalments; and to use these instalments for the settlement of new families, until all the families you were disposed to assist had emigrated. To give your settlers page 24 no permanent title to the land—hut to allow them to enter on and occupy it as yearly tenants only—until, say one-half of the whole debt was repaid to you; when that was done, to give them a deed of the land in fee simple, taking back from them a mortgage for the sum remaining due.

You should, of course, have an agent resident in your settlement.

I beg you to observe, particularly, that the Leading Principle of any plan that I would suggest, would always be this—to make your settlers repay you in a few yearly instalments, And to use these Instalments from Year to Year, for the Establishment of New Settlers. It cannot be expected that a landed proprietor could command the sum which would be necessary to convey out and to settle all at once, in a tolerable way, any very large number of families; but by settling in a sufficient manner, a moderate number of families in the first year, and then using the instalments repaid by them to establish new batches—and so with each successive batch—you will be surprised to see how rapidly the work accumulates. In a few years you can thus establish a greater number of settlers than you will probably think it possible to settle by these means, until you have gone into the arithmetical calculation. The work grows like compound interest. But of this again.

It should be made perfectly plain to the settlers from the beginning that they were not expected to pay you any thing but the money which you had directly advanced for them, and the interest which you would be obliged to pay for it yourself. This would leave you without any direct profits in your dealings with your emigrants to cover the expenses of agency and casualties. But whenever a settlement is effected in any new district, the land immediately adjoining becomes, at once, by the mere fact of there being a settlement there, worth from two to three times the government price. Your unsettled lands are thus at once enhanced in value; some of these you may sell at an advanced price to strangers—others, as I have suggested, you can sell at an advanced price to your own settlers. This advance of price will produce a fund sufficient to cover the cost of agencies, and those numerous incidental losses that must occur from the deaths of some parties indebted—the continued sickness of other parties, the assistance that you will find it well and expedient to give towards schools, roads, doctors, and the support of clergymen, &c., &c. Thus it will be unnecessary for you to make any direct charge upon your settlers, or to make any immediate profit on your transactions with them. Any such charges or profits, however well founded and reasonable in themselves, might grow into abuse; with a people not indisposed to suspicion, they would certainly be liable to be misconstrued, and set down as extortions and oppressions, and they might thus become the source of a discontent that would mar the success of the best-intended enterprise.

As to the amount and the cost of the outfit that you must supply to your settlers, this question is most materially affected by your having one very poor class of settlers to deal with. I have already explained that it will be your best policy—indeed a necessary policy —to expend on your settlers who can pay their own expenses of page 25 conveyance out, as large a sum in their after-outfit as you will live to expend both in conveyance and outfit on those settlers whose cost of conveyance you must advance. The expense incurred non your poorest settlers, therefore, who, I take it for granted, will also be by far the most numerous class of settlers, must regulate the amount of expense for all. Now the expense of conveying out to the place of settlement a tolerably large family, will in itself, is I have already stated, amount to about £40. The question then is, how much you will further expend for their after-outfit? Nov, in the mode that I propose to deal with these families, an out fit of £20, applied to their establishment on their farms, would enable each family to get along, to do pretty well in time, and after a few years to commence making you repayments; but there would be great danger that in that time the whole debt would grow tale, and the probability of its being ever collected would thus be considerably diminished. An after-outfit of about £35, on the other hand, would place the family in circumstances to commence repayment at the end of the very first year after you had closed your expenditure on their account, and the family had arrived in the settlement. The difference in amount between the two outlays would be the difference between £60 and £75—an inconsiderable difference; but the difference in result between the two outlays would be very great indeed. The larger outlay would enable the settler to commence repaying you at the end of the first year, while on the smaller outlay he could scarcely be expected to make you any repayment sooner than the end of the third year, and then the whole debt would be in danger of growing stale—£60—a debt so large, in proportion to the whole probable means of the debtor, that if permitted to lie over for a few years, it is difficult to expect that it would ever be collected. This consideration throws the balance altogether in favour of the more liberal outfit; and the preference becomes still more unquestionable, when you further consider that since, with the larger outfit, the repayments would commence immediately, and these repayments would be employed for the establishment of new settlers, you could, within a moderate number of years, have a far greater number of settlers established, with the same capital, by expending on each family £75, thus enabling them to make early and rapid repayments, than by expending only £60 on each, and having the repayments deferred. This last consideration, in fact, leaves all the advantages on the side of the more liberal outfit—none at all on the side of the smaller outfit, in the case of settlers whose whole expense of conveyance you should advance.

If, indeed, you were dealing only with families all of whom would pay their own expenses out, the case would be widely different. Twenty pounds would set them a going in some kind of way: after some years they could begin to repay you; and it would not greatly endanger the ultimate collection of so small a debt to let it lie over for a few years. On the other hand, it would require an outfit of from £55 to £75 to enable them to commence making you repayments immediately (this is a greater after-outfit than I have stated to be necessary for a similar purpose in the case page 26 of the poorer settlers—the reason of the difference will become clear in the course of this paper). The difference, therefore, between the two modes of outfit, in the case of families paying their own expenses, would be the difference between £20 on the one hand, and £55 or £75 on the other—a great difference, which might well throw the choice in favour of the smaller outfit. You, however, have to settle, for the most part, the poorest class of settlers, and you must adopt the more liberal standard of expenditure.

The prairie land is particularly well suited to the more liberal system of expenditure: since for an additional outlay of 6s. or 8s. British per acre, you can break up any quantity of additional land for your settlers which they can thenceforth work with a facility that we are totally unused to in this country. In timbered land the expenditure of an additional hundred dollars (£21) would only increase the profitable acreage of your settler's farm by ten acres, encumbered with stumps—100 dollars would clear about so many. In prairie land the same sum would add fifty, or perhaps sixty-five acres, clear, smooth, and unobstructed, to the land under the plough —100 dollars would break up that quantity; and up to the point at which the settler's family would find full occupation in the cultivation of the land broken up, it would evidently be your policy to break up the greatest surface possible, because the consequence would be so to accelerate the repayments as to make your capital revolve faster, and actually to enable you, with a smaller capital, ultimately to establish, in a better way, a greater number of settlers.

The more I have thought over this matter, the more I feel satisfied that the point to which you should direct whatever increased liberality you might be disposed to exercise on behalf of your settlers, should be the breaking up an increased quantity of land for them—thus placing them in possession of farms largely productive, from the start. In corresponding, some time since, with your brother, on this subject, I made some estimates; without making any difference in the sums of the estimates I made for him, I would now so far alter the items, as to include the breaking up of more land for the settlers, and to economize at other points.

Now, to proceed to details:—and, first, as to the First Class of settlers—those who would pay the whole of their own expenses to the place of settlement. This class I would deal with and outfit as follows:—

I would have them come on to the settlement in May. My general arrangements would be such as to make it easy for me to provide a temporary shelter for the families, while they were building their own log-houses. Towards the building of those log-houses I would help each family to the amount of about thirty dollars each, furnishing them to that amount with boards, shingles, nails, carpenters' work, and the superintendence of a skilful American axe-man, employed in overseeing the work of, say, every ten or fifteen of them, &c. I would give each family forty acres of land at the cost price, with the right of having the forty adjoining it at some very moderate advance on the cost price (say, one dollar an acre) in the second year—providing that at the end of the first year they' had paid up, say, one-fourth of their whole debt. I would break up page 27 for them at once the whole forty acres that I had given them in the first instance; I would furnish them seed to sow one-half of it in wheat, a couple of acres in potatoes, and the remainder in Indian corn; I would furnish them a yoke of oxen, with a plough, yoke, and chains, &c., axes, spades, shovels, hoes, scythes, &c.; I would give them a cow, half a dozen sheep, some young pigs, and provisions enough to last them (along with the potatoes and Indian corn that they should plant in the newly-broken land,) for a year or fifteen months.

Three hundred and forty-five dollars make seventy-one pounds seventeen shillings and eight pence. As some small additional items would no doubt he still found requisite, let us say seventy-five pounds for each family. Now, a family established in the manner above estimated for could easily pay off the whole debt, with interest, in four yearly instalments. The settler and his family would arrive at your settlement early in May (say, of the year 1849). Some temporary shelter being provided for his family, and the breaking up of his farm being in course of execution by you, the work immediately before him, and to be executed by himself and family, would be to plant potatoes and Indian corn, and to sow buckwheat in some portions of his newly-broken ground; and, this done, to build his log-house—the logs for which it would be well that you should have ready felled for him (felled during the winter season) in the woods—and to make some temporary fence round such portion of his land as he had put under crop. On this newly-broken land the potatoes would yield him a first-rate crop—the Indian corn would yield a half or third of an ordinary crop—and the buckwheat would yield a tolerable crop—all of which would come in within a few months after the settler had arrived out. These crops furnishing, as they would, food both for the settler's family and for his pigs, would, with the page 28 forty dollars which I have allowed in the above estimate for extra provisions, abundantly supply the family in provisions for the first year or fifteen months. In summer, the settler should cut his hay, which is to be had in abundance on the wild prairie; and in autumn, he should sow twenty acres of his newly-broken land in wheat; and in the latter part of autumn and the succeeding winter he should employ himself and family in perfecting the fencing of his land. They should be able, during the autumn and winter, to make a perfect rail fence round the whole forty-acre lot. In spring (say of the year 1850), the settler should plant his other twenty acres, say, eighteen of them in Indian corn, and two of them in potatoes. If his family were strong handed and industrious, they should be able to take in at this time the reserved forty-acre lot adjoining their farm, and to break up some portion of it. In July (of 1850—fourteen or fifteen months after their first arrival out) their first wheat harvest would be ripe; and from that crop and their Indian corn crop, which would be ripe in September, but principally from the wheat crop, they should make you their first instalment of repayment.

The probability of his having an additional crop upon land newly taken in that year, I will leave out of account.

Out of the crop stated above your settler ought to be able to spare you, say, 200 bushels of wheat and 300 bushels of Indian corn, which at very low prices would be worth, 200 bushels of wheat at forty-five cents per bushel—ninety dollars; 300 bushels of Indian corn at eighteen cents per bushel—forty-eight dollars; in all, 138 dollars, or £28 10s. Let us say that in round numbers he could pay you £30 out of his first harvest: in each succeeding year his page 29 condition would be still better, as be would take in more land; let us say, then, that in each succeeding year for three years he would pay you £20, this would rather more than discharge the debt, principal and interest, in four years. These payments would evidently be light enough to permit the industrious settler not only to make them with reasonable facility, but at the same time to increase his stock, improve his buildings, and better his general condition.

Once the prairie is broken up a family can manage a great extent of farm, which you may judge of from the following facts:—First, the land requires no manure for many years, which saves all that vast labour of mixing, carting, and spreading manure, that constitutes so large a proportion of the work of an old country farm. Secondly, the land is very clear of weeds for the first few years and very friable, and a single ploughing is generally sufficient in the year, especially as the horse-hoeing among the Indian corn crop serves all the purposes of a fallow. Thirdly, the soil is so mellow that a pair of horses or a pair of oxen plough two English acres in the day as their ordinary work. A pair of smart horses can plough three acres in the day when pushed, and in this mellow soil a smart boy of fourteen or sixteen can hold a plough with as much effect as a man. Fourthly, there is little or no hand-work in the cultivation. The Indian corn, and even the potatoes, are planted in what are called "hills;" that is, light plough furrows are run crossbarred each way across and along the field at four feet apart, and at the points where they intersect each other the Indian corn or the potatoes are planted, so that in the after culture, when the weeds are to be destroyed, the plough runs both ways close up to the plants, throwing the earth towards them, and thus forming "hills;" there is, therefore, little or no hand-weeding, and though there is some hand-hoeing, there is not much even of that, as the plough runs through the hills every way and close up to them. Fifthly, in harvesting, a good cradler, with a cradle-scythe, cuts down three acres of wheat in a day; a less expert cradler cuts in proportion. Sixthly, the wheat once cut, bound up into large sheaves and stooked, after standing thus for about two days is fit either to be carried to the barn or to be threshed and ground into flour, such is the dryness of the atmosphere; and for the same reason in hay making, the grass once cut the hay almost saves itself. From these facts you will see that a single family could cultivate three or four times the quantity of land in America that they could in this country, especially of prairie land unobstructed as it is by stumps. A moderate family, comprising say a father and a couple of boys or even one boy, could manage quite a large farm and raise an immense quantity of produce without any help from without. The crops estimated above are far within their ability to manage and to harvest.

I have estimated the prices of the produce on the supposition that they should be considerably below the rates which were current in the region I allude to in the past autumn of 1847, when they were not extraordinarily high, and that your settlement should be seventy or eighty miles distant from Chicago, or such other lake port as would constitute its ruling market; but you might have your settlement within thirty or forty miles of Chicago, if you were willing to pay page 30 some advanced price for such timbered land as you would need, in which case the quantity of produce I have named as producing £30, might fairly be expected to produce from £37 to £40; or if the average prices of last autumn should be current, full £50. Wheat ranged last autumn at Chicago at from 85 cents to 108 cents per bushel, sustaining itself for a considerable time at the latter price. At this latter price it would pay to send flour to Liverpool and sell it there at about 31s. per barrel. In fact, this latter quotation was based upon a price of 29s. and 30s. a barrel at Liverpool, with some hopes of a slight advance. But it must be plain to you that the prices I have counted on are not high, when I have estimated wheat at only 45 cents, that is, Is. 10½d. per bushel of sixty pounds—or 15s. British per quarter.

I would require a large repayment from the settlors the first year, because I would wish to reduce the tail end of the debt as fast as possible, bringing the balance as far within the limits of the security and at the earliest moment that it could be done. The first year, too, would be the time to press the settler for repayment, because in that year he would still feel himself an Irish labourer, not yet an American farmer, and would not deem it any hardship if, in order to become the owner of a farm and stock, he had to live for a time in a manner that was not yet quite a world removed from that to which, as an Irish labourer, he had been accustomed.

"But," I have heard it said, "in a new country where it is not so easy as in old countries to enforce the obligation of contracts, will the settler keep faith with you? He would clearly be able to make you these payments if he were so inclined, but will he make them?" It is in some measure true that in new countries when a man once parts with his property it is not so easy to compel payment for it from a poor and reluctant creditor as it would be in the old countries, because harsh measures that would strip a poor man of all his means would, in these new countries, be looked on with greater disfavour by the community; but when a man has not parted with his property there is no sentiment incident to new countries any more than to old ones that would countenance any other party in carrying off that property from him. Now, although I have spoken of your giving the settler so much land, ploughing so many acres for him, giving him cattle, a cow, tools, pigs, sheep, provisions, &c., I have done so only for the convenience of using a short phrase in describing the transaction. The fact is, you should not give him any thing until he had paid for it. For the first year he should occupy the land only as your yearly tenant. The land would still be yours; the house you helped him to build would be yours; the breaking-up done upon the land would be yours; ploughs, tools, and cattle would still be yours; and the landlord's proportion of the growing crop would be yours; nay, the very provisions with which from week to week you were supplying him would still be yours,—for as fast as his family consumed them they would be turned into improvements made by his labour on your land. Tenancy, as a permanent thing, is not practised in the Western States; but temporary tenancies, meant to last only for a few years, are almost as common as occupancy accompanying the fee simple. The form of tenancy most common in the Western page 31 States is one that is quite consistent with the arrangements I am now speaking of. It is a tenancy on shares. Sometimes the owner of the land hires to the tenant the farm only, in which ease the tenant pays for rent usually one-third of the gross crop. Sometimes he supplies him not only with the farm, but also with seed, working cattle, tools, &c., and in this case the landowner usually receives one-half the gross produce, about equal, you may see, to what I have set down as the first year's payment to be made to you by your settler. Now, although the honourable understanding between you and your settler should be, that the land and all that you put into his hands should be his absolute property, at specified prices, and these first cost prices, when he had paid for them; and that every payment he made to you, under whatever name made, should apply upon the purchase; the written legal contract between you for the first year should be a contract of tenancy, such as is common in the country, under which you should supply to him the land, and break it up for him; furnish him with seed, and also with cattle, implements, sheep, a cow, pigs, &c.; all of which should continue to be your property, and he on the other hand should pay you a certain proportion of the produce of the farm. This sort of tenancy is quite common in the western country; and under it men no more dream of its happening that the tenant should wrong the landlord, which he could do only by carrying off the landlord's cattle or implements, or his share of the crops, than they fear that he should carry off the like property from the landowner's own homestead. At the end of the first year, when the tenant had made his first payment, you should give him to the extent of that payment a bill of sale of the cattle, implements, etc., and at the same time give him a bond for a deed of his farm; that is, a bond conditioned that yon should convey to him the fee simple of his farm when he had paid you the balance of the debt. At the end of the second year, if lie had paid up the instalment of that year, and had meantime been industrious in improving his farm, that farm should be worth more than double the balance then remaining duo. In this case you should at once convey the fee simple to him, taking a mortgage back for the amount still due to you. If he had not been industrious, and if the farm was still but a scanty security, the conveyance should be delayed for another year. Under this arrangement, which any one who is acquainted with the business of the Western States will at once recognize as consisting of the everyday modes of assurance used there in the very common transaction of selling farms to persons who have no ready money to pay for them, but buy them on credit, with the expectation of paying for them out of the produce they raise from them, your settler has no opportunity of making away with your property, nor is he at any time placed under the mischievous delusion that he is a landowner, nor an owner of anything, before that thing is paid for; but lie is constantly kept in mind that he is simply a labourer lately arrived from Ireland, placed by you in circumstances that will enable him, by the exercise of a reasonable share of industry and self-denial, to earn himself a farm. The virtual arrangement between you and him consists in some part of a loose page 32 understanding, but that is left loose only to give room to certain advantages for him. The strict written agreement, though not meant to be strictly acted on, keeps all straight in the main, and ensures that neither of you can suffer material injury from the other. He certainly can possibly suffer none.

The sum of £75 may seem a large amount to expend for the settlement of each family; but it is not really a large amount when you consider that it is to be repaid back, with interest, in four annual instalments; and that these instalments, continuing to be used for the same purpose as the original sum, multiply, several times, the work of that original sum, within a very moderate number of years. For instance, at £75 per family, £6,000 would settle at first only eighty families; but perhaps you will scarcely expect to find that used as I have suggested above, it will at the end of the sixth year have settled no less than two hundred and forty-nine families. Yet, this is only the result of a simple arithmetical calculation, of which you can satisfy yourself in a few minutes.

So far for the first class of settlers.

I now come to consider the second class of settlers—those who could pay, say one-half of the expense of their own conveyance to your place of settlement. This, and the third class, who could pay no portion of the cost of their own conveyance, introduce a new element to be dealt with—viz., the cost of their conveyance. This cost of conveyance has been found the great difficulty in the way of colonizing, on a self-paying system, with poor families, by every person who has given his attention to this subject. This portion of the expenditure is so heavy, and, as respects any direct productiveness, so barren, that it is looked upon as overwhelming alike the ability and the will of the settler to reimburse the capitalist, even though the enhanced value of the adjacent lands accruing from the settle- page 33 ment be put to the credit of the speculation. Such are the views of Mr. Godley. He says, in effect, "Convey the emigrants forus," (or what amounts to the same thing, "pay us a sum about equvalent to the cost of conveying them,") "and private enterprise will do all the rest; for the remaining operations will repay enterprise for undertaking and accomplishing them." These conclusions have generally been arrived at from a view of things in Canada. I am persuaded that the United States are altogether more favourable to an enterprise of this nature than Canada; but still I believe it to be true as respects the United States also, that according to the mode of emigration that is ordinarily contemplated when this subject is discussed, and taking into consideration only those advantages that could be realized by ordinary commercial speculators—that is, the direct proceeds of the enterprise itself—it would never do to take up whole families of poor people, pay their expenses across the Atlantic and to the place of settlement, establish them upon farms, and rely for the reimbursement of the capital employed, together with such profits as such an enterprise ought to yield, upon the repayments of the settlers, and the enhanced value of the reserved lauds.

But your case is different. In the first place you do not seek to make a commercial profit upon the enterprise, but only to accomplish the operation without loss. And in the next place you should adopt, for families who could not pay their own expenses of conveyance, a plan of emigration widely differing from that ordinarily contemplated—a plan, too, which could not easily be adopted by any but a landed proprietor colonizing with his own tenantry. An Irish landed proprietor stands in quite a different position from an ordinary capitalist in undertaking such an enterprise as this. The proprietor of an estate that is unable to afford employment and support to its population would be very richly repaid for such an enterprise, if he only incurred no direct loss in the transaction. The saving of poor rate and other advantages to be gained at home would constitute an abundant profit indeed. But even the proprietor of an estate would run too great a risk—in fact, would be pretty sure to make total shipwreck of the business—if he took out whole families at once, paying all the expenses of their conveyance to the place of their ultimate location, and landing them at his settlement already from £30 to £45 in his debt for conveyance, with some £60 or £70 more to be expended in establishing them, all of which value was still to be created and extracted from the land by the settler. He must set to work in quite a different manner. If he has to pay the expense of conveying the families, he must take out the members of each family by degrees; and according as the members who have first gone out improve the farm allotted to them—making it a sufficient security for the expense to be incurred in taking out the remaining members of the family—and create and extract from the soil for themselves those items of necessary outfit which the landlord has had to supply to those settlers who pay their own expenses out—he should then send out those members of the family who have been left behind. This requires that the party colonizing should take a certain care of that part of the family which is last to go out; and this, you see, page 34 is a thing that could scarcely be done but in connexion with a landed estate at home.

If you examine the actual nature of the difficulties which stand in the way of any self-paying system of colonizing with parties whose expenses of conveyance you should be compelled to pay, you will see how naturally the mode that I have just indicated, of colonizing with the poorest class of families, presents itself, and how effective it may be made for securing repayment. The improbability of repayment does not arise from any want of the physical elements, so to speak, that would enable and facilitate it; these exist abundantly. The productiveness of labour, and, consequent upon the productiveness of labour, the rate of wages is so high in America, that a poor family removed from this country and either left to the ordinary labour market of America or settled on a farm for themselves, could unquestionably, with great ease and within a very reasonable period, repay the cost of their conveyance out to any parties who had so far befriended them as to advance their expenses. This is abundantly attested by the enormous aggregate of sums (already alluded to) that are sent home by the labouring Irish in America to take out the portions of the family that still remain in this country. If an individual or two of a family can go out and earn and remit the funds necessary for taking out all the rest of the family, a whole family having gone out at once at another party's expense, could certainly earn and repay the sum advanced for conveying them. The question is—are they likely to repay? And this is a question not of honesty merely, but of strong will, of steady purpose, of forbearance, of self-denial. The Irish labourer in America who has left friends behind him whom he wishes to bring out, sticks to the cities where he gets ready money wages; he does not spend these wages, but hoards them—he continues to live in many respects as poorly as he did in Ireland—he wears the old gray coat, and is willing to be laughed at for it—he forbears investing his savings in land—he lets the world pass him, and foregoes all hope of advancing in life until he has accomplished the one sacred object, the rescue of his immediate friends from the misery of Ireland. This is the power that accomplishes that spontaneous emigration of the poor which we see working itself out every day. But of this you cannot avail yourself if you take out whole families at once at your expense. No average parcel of men, whether settled as labourers or as farmers, will either strain themselves to the same incessant labour, or torture themselves with the same painful forbearances and self-imposed inferiorities in order to pay you a bygone debt incurred in the conveyance of their families (especially when you had an object of your own to accomplish in taking them out), as they would do to get these families out if they were still left behind. The settlers, if taken out by whole families at a time, would arrive at your location each from £30 to £45 in your debt, which indebtedness must be still enormously increased by the expenses of establishing them. This overhanging weight, so much of it a dead weight, would kill every energy. They would feel as if they were your bondsmen. Such a debt would be too heavy an encumbrance even on the advantages you offered them; it would be looked on as merely the chain of a long slavery which they page 35 would soon find that they could not be compelled to drag, and which accordingly they would not drag. They would either in a short time abandon your settlement, or they would enter on your farms to live lazily on them without improving them, and without any resolute intention of ever making you a repayment. Such a plan of colonizing, therefore, you cannot entertain. If you would succeed with families the expense of whose conveyance you should wholly or partly bear, you must observe the natural course by which the spontaneous emigration of the poor works itself out, and imitate it. Send out a portion of the family first, and as their labour, employed upon the farms which they are ultimately to occupy—at the same time that it creates a home and a seat of industry for their family—makes a security to you for the repayment of any advances that you may afterwards make in taking out the family, send the family after them. By doing this you use the same natural affections as a power to aid you in bringing about the emigration of the family that are found to operate so effectually in the emigration that works itself. There is this difference, however, that you would enable your emigrants to do with ease, with certainty, and within a few months—or in the case of the poorest families, within a year—what poor families left to their own resources can do only painfully, with much uncertainty, and after several years. How the portion of the family that remains at home is to be taken care of I will hereafter inquire.

To proceed to details, then, as to those parties whose expenses; of conveyance out you should in part, or in the whole, bear. They constitute two of the classes into which I have divided your emigrants—the second and third: those who could pay half of their own expenses, requiring you to pay the other half; and those who could pay nothing, but would require you to pay all. I would deal with both of these classes on the principle which I have just been endeavouring to explain, but putting a wide difference between them. The first class, who could pay half their own expenses, I would require each to send out in May one male member of the family—such a member as the family could rely on for fidelity to it, (this must almost always be the father)—or, if the family was very large, two. When this member of the family had worked upon his future farm until autumn, you might then send the family out to him; thus all the members of this second class of families would be united again, after a separation of only five or six months. The third, or poorest, class of families you should require to send out in like manner, but at your expense, a male member of the family in the month of May; but, as you would be obliged to bear the whole of the expenses of those families, you could not send the remainder of the family as early as in the case of the second class of families: you might, indeed, in autumn, take out to the father any one or two (if the family were large, and he desired it,) members of the family whom he might designate, but the whole of the family you could not send out to him until the succeeding year; thus the members of this third class of families would not be all united again until after an interval of twelve months. But this would not be the only difference that I would place between the page 36 second and the third class. As you will see presently, I would make a very considerable difference in the outfit that I would provide for them after their arrival. The second class I would outfit in a manner very nearly equal to the first class; the third I would retain for the first year almost as labourers, so that they would not until the second year, that is, the year in which their families bad joined them, find themselves arrived at the point from which the other two classes had started. If this broad demarcation were not drawn between those several classes, I apprehend that you would soon find all those classes run into one—that is, into the class who would contribute nothing towards the cost of their own conveyance out. If the class who had money found that those who had not money were placed by you in as good a position as themselves, they would deny having the money, and would fling themselves altogether upon you. But under the arrangement that I have suggested, no man who possessed the means of paying the whole expense of his family's conveyance would, for the sake of concealing £17 or £18 of it from your observation, drop himself into the second class, in which he would be separated from his family for six months, especially, when by doing so his outfit on his arrival at the location would be by so much the less advantageous. Nor again, would any man who could pay half the expenses of his family's conveyance conceal his ability to do so, and drop himself into the third class, when the consequence would be, that he would thus separate himself from his family for no less a time than twelve or fourteen months; and that in starting as a farmer he would place himself a full year behind either of the other classes, with disadvantages as to outfit besides.

You will gather from what I have already said, and will see on the face of my estimates by-and-by, that, on the plan I contemplate, you would have to expend about the same sum per family on each of the three classes: those who could pay all, and those who could pay half, and those who could pay none of the expenses of their own conveyance. You will be disposed to ask then, what advantage do you derive from having any class who could pay the whole or any part of their own expenses out 1 Your advantage would be this:—First, your first class of families would take their whole family in a body, leaving you unencumbered with the charge of any portion of the family at home; your second would relieve you from the encumbrance in about five months; while your third would leave you affected with the encumbrance for twelve months. Secondly, your first class of families would make their repayments with more facility and with more rapidity than your second; your second would make them with more rapidity than your third. Thirdly, your first class of families would arrive at your settlements not in your debt at all; your advances to them would include no dead weight, they would all be for property fresh put into their hands and becoming immediately productive: your security, therefore, (independently that you would not part with the legal property in any thing until it was paid for,) would be just so much the more satisfactory. This would be partially true of your second class also, just in proportion as that class had paid its own expenses out. The advances to your third class for the conveyance of their families would, it is true, also be covered by page 37 a security previously created on the land by the pioneer labourer or labourers of the family; but it is evident that this security would not be so fresh from the mint—would not be of the same current, palpable, and so to speak, ready-money kind as the other. Fourthly, as the first class would repay you early and steadily, and with considerable facility, the fact of their having done so would, in itself, enlist them in favour of general and steady repayments throughout your settlement. They would not countenance others in evading prompt payments, or in taking advantages of you which they had not taken themselves. Fifthly, this first and most prosperous class would, as I have already said, give character to your settlement; the results accomplished by you would not be measured by the condition of the poorest class, most of your advances for whom had been cast into the barren sea, but by the condition of those persons every penny of your advances for whom was directly fructifying. The condition of this class would determine the estimate formed at homo by the people of your estate as to the prospects of your undertaking and the amount of advantages conferred upon your colonists. Sixthly, it would be necessary for your colony that there should be a certain number of families arrived out with the very first settlers, and a still greater number before the winter set in. This would be necessary in order that the labourers arriving out without their families should be conveniently lodged, cooked for, and washed for. This necessity would be exactly met by the mode I have suggested for dealing with your first and second class of settlers. I hope you will think then with me, that these advantages conferred on your general system would give you the full benefit of the contribution towards the expense of their own establishment elicited from the first and second class of families, without your insisting that these contributions should be made the means of diminishing your direct outlay upon them.

The details of my proceedings with the Second Class of settlers would be as follows:—The father of the family (or such other male labourer of the family as might be selected by them,) should go out as I have said in May. During the spring and summer they should be employed in helping to break up their own land, in fencing it, in planting potatoes and Indian corn—and such other spring crop as newly broken ground would be fit to yield—to help in the support of their family and their stock during the succeeding winter; also in cutting hay for their cattle. Towards the close of summer they should build their log-houses and prepare for the arrival of their families, the whole of which you should take out to them in the autumn. The latter end of autumn and the whole of the winter they should devote to preparing fencing timber and fencing their land.

My estimate for the conveyance and establishment of these families I give below. It will be seen that for them I propose to break less land than for the first class of families. It would be necessary thus to limit the quantity of land broken for them, because I fear it might prove physically impossible to make arrangements to break up all the land that you might desire to have broken for all your families; and your first class settlers should get the preference and have the greatest quantity broken up for them. Some of your land you should get broken by hired men and teams; but for the breaking of the page 38 greater part of it you could use your own settlers—some of whom would no doubt soon show an aptitude for handling the breaking plough, while others could drive the team—and you would employ your own cattle. These would be the same cattle that you should at all events provide for your settlers to carry on the after cultivation of their farms; when the breaking was complete you would distribute them—sell them—among them. To your first class of settlers I have charged the whole cost of hiring the breaking to be done—that is, two dollars an acre; to this second class I only charge one-half the cost. The first class having their families with them from the beginning, would have to build their houses immediately, which would be as much as they and their families could attend to for a time along with the getting down of some little crop: but this second class not having their families with them, nor expecting them until towards winter, need not build their houses until that time. They could, therefore, attend to their own breaking, needing only your ploughs and ox-teams; and I therefore charge them only with one dollar an acre, which would abundantly pay for the use of the ploughs and the cattle.

It would be very easy to arrange, that as soon as the houses of the first class of settlers were built they should lodge these pioneers of the second class of settlers, and also wash and cook for them (you furnishing such rations as they would need in addition to their own crop,) until their own houses were built and their own families had arrived towards winter.

It may occur to you as a difficulty in these arrangements, that these families who could pay only half their own expenses of conveyance would not always be so large as to admit of being divided in the manner I have suggested. The classification could not of course be always made with mathematical correctness; but I think you would generally find that the families who could pay about half their own expenses would be the large families of your small farmers, so large as to constitute five or six statute adults, whose cost of conveyance, therefore, would amount to from £37 10s. to £46; while the small families of this farmer class, which would constitute only three or four statute adults, and whose conveyance, therefore, would cost only from £22 10s. to £30, would generally be able to eke out the whole amount of their expenses, or nearly the whole amount, and would fall into your first class. Your families, therefore, who could pay a portion of their own expenses out, but would require some large assistance from you to make up the whole amount of their expenses—in fact your second class of families—would generally be large families, who could be conveniently divided in the manner I have suggested.

The pioneer members of these families would of course pay their own expenses out, so that you would have no advances to make for the conveyance of any part of their families until considerable work had been done upon the farm abroad. If the father could take out nearly half of the family when he was going out, so much the better—say himself and a couple of boys under fourteen years of age. These boys would be most useful, and if the family was not such that he could take two boys, a girl would not conic at all amiss.

For each of these families I would, as in the case of the first class, page 39 reserve a second forty acre lot, adjoining the original forty, with the privilege of buying it at a reasonable advance upon the cost piece. My estimate for the second class of families is as follows:—

	Dollars.
Forty acres of land,	50
Help towards building log-houses,	20
Help of cattle, &c., towards breaking up twenty-five acres of land,	25
Seed wheat for fifteen acres,	18
Seed potatoes for two acres,	10
Indian corn seed	2
A yoke of oxen,	45
Plough, yoke, and chains,	15
A harrow,	5
A sled,	10
Axes, spades, &c.,	10
A cow,	10
Six sheep,	8
Pigs,	5
Provisions (partial), the family in this case would not arrive until winter,	25
Half the conveyance of the whole family,	90
	349

I think that these families ought to pay you very nearly as fast as the first class families. They would generally be stronger handed than the first, and could manage any quantity of land that you could break up for them. It would be well, therefore, to help them to break up some further quantity of land in the second year, as your best policy would be to help them well forward at the outset, and then to press for early repayments. These families would, at their first wheat harvest, have fifteen acres of wheat and ten acres of Indian corn on the land broken in the first year (not to speak of potatoes, &c., in the newly broken ground), which should produce about 270 bushels of wheat and 350 bushels of Indian corn. They should be quite able to spare you, say 170 bushels of wheat and 200 bushels of Indian corn, which, at the prices I have supposed in the case of the first class settlers, would produce about £25. These families should repay you in four or five years. I would have you press for a large repayment in the first year, that is in the year of the first wheat harvest, as the first repayment would be the important one to secure, and that first harvest being almost altogether of your own creation, it would not be considered hard of you to press for a large share of it. It would be better policy to lighten the after payments than the first payments.

Three hundred and forty-nine dollars is about £73. We will therefore say in round numbers that it costs £75 for establishing each of these families; and let us say that you would be repaid in five yearly instalments, not in four. At this rate £6,000 would have established 243 families,—in round numbers 250—by the end of the seventh year.

Now, as to the Third Class, who are wholly without means to assist themselves. In this class I take it for granted that you would have great numbers of families pressing on you, and you would, page 40 therefore, have an opportunity of making your own choice among them. You should make choice only of large families, such as could divide themselves—allowing some trustworthy male member to go out first, and one other member, or two if possible, to follow him in a few months, and still leaving some male member of the family to labour for the support of the remainder while they continued at home, and to give them aid and protection on their passage out. I shall by-and-by state my views with regard to the portions of the family that would remain at home. At present I will follow the progress of the male member—generally the father—who would go out as the pioneer. You should pay his expenses, of course, which would be about £7 10s. When he arrived at your settlement he, like the others, should have his forty-acre lot. I would not break up for him the first year more than about fifteen acres—not that if I had this class to deal with alone I would not deem it as desirable to break up largely for them as for any other class, but having the other classes to deal with whose families would be with them in the first year, and apprehending, as I have already stated, that it would not be possible to make arrangements to break up as largely as desirable for all, I would throw my force upon the first two classes, to push them ahead from the start; while I would have these pioneer labourers of the third class employed partially upon their own farms, and partially engaged on hire, both in executing the extensive work of breaking that you should undertake to perform for your first class, and in the numerous operations, as hay-saving, fencing, farm-work, &c., &c., that it would be necessary for you to undertake yourself, in order not only to support the great number of cattle that you would first employ in breaking, and would afterwards distribute to your settlers, but also to supply your settlers with articles of produce, both in provisions and seed, at first cost. It would be impossible to follow all this into detail, as the works in which you would have to employ the men would be numerous and multifarious. I will only say, that I believe that for more than one-third of the year these men would be labouring for wages for you, at work that, either directly or indirectly, would form a portion of the charge made by you against the other classes of settlers in the foregoing estimates. For instance, you charge your first class of settlers eighty dollars each for forty acres of land broken up. This land might, for the most part, be broken up by the third class of settlers with your cattle. The second class of settlers are supposed for the most part to do their own breaking up with your cattle. But if you have cattle to do this breaking up, you do not gather them all for the first time on the day you send them out to break for your settlers. You have had them for some time beforehand, and must have had hay and provender provided for them, and they must have been tended: this is employment for the pioneers of your third class of settlers. The labour of your cattle, employed in breaking up the land of your settlers of any class, is so far the produce of these men's labour; and the wages you pay them may be considered as already charged in the estimates for these classes, whether for the first, for the second, or for the third themselves. While working for themselves, I would expect these third class pioneers to break up, as I have said, fifteen acres; to page 41 plant an acre of potatoes, and some Indian corn, to help to provision them for the year; during the winter to fence the entire forty-acre lot, and also to prepare the logs for their log-houses, ready to be put together in spring, before the arrival of their families. In the second spring they might break up, with your cattle, twenty or twenty-five acres more. Meantime their families would be despatched to them from Ireland. When the families arrived the first harvest would be nearly ripe. From this class of settlers I would expect no repayment out of their first harvest; but as I would not, up to that time, furnish them with working cattle, nor with other matters furnished to the other class of settlers, I would leave the proceeds of this harvest in their hands, to procure these necessaries. I would not look for any repayment from them until the second harvest—and this would be quite reasonable, as it would in fact be only in the beginning of the second year that you had laid out for them the last and heaviest portion of the expenditure incurred on their behalf, including the expense of conveying their families. Or—I would insist upon a repayment out of the first harvest, and then furnish them with the necessaries in question, which would amount to the same thing.

Three hundred and forty-one dollars make seventy one pounds, sterling. We will again leave a margin for small omissions, and say that seventy-five pounds is the cost of carrying out a family of the third class, consisting of seven persons, and establishing them in the manner indicated in the above estimate. As already explained, I have not included in this estimate any charge for furnishing them with working cattle nor a plough; but in the first year I have charged them with twenty-five dollars for the hire of working cattle, and I leave them the harvest, which they begin to reap in a month or six weeks after the arrival of the family, to procure those necessaries. That harvest will consist of ten acres of wheat, producing about one hundred and eighty bushels—five acres of Indian corn, producing about one hundred and seventy-five bushels—and as many acres of potatoes and Indian corn as they choose to plant in the twenty-five acres newly broken in that year. I conceive that those third class families will start in their second year, that is, the year in which the families have arrived out, under as favourable circumstances as the first class families have started in their first year; they should, therefore, be able to pay you in four yearly instalments, commencing at the close of their second year, that is, commencing with their second wheat harvest.

It will be necessary that' you provide the pioneers of the third class families with lodgings, and take care that they have their cooking and washing done for them for the first year, before their own families have arrived, or their houses are built. All this can easily be provided for by arrangement with those families who are already on the spot.

This class of settlers is settled at the same expense as each of the other classes. But it is probable that the number of families in this class will be as numerous as in both the other two classes; and as we have supposed two hundred and fifty families in each of the other two classes, it may be a fair proportion to suppose that this class will include five hundred families. It will be found on calculation, that (although the arrangements both for the outlay and the repayments differ somewhat,) the capital employed for this class of settlers will be returned in about the same time as that employed in settling the second class; and the same amount of capital will establish about the same number of families within the same period, as in the case of the second class. Six thousand pounds, therefore, would establish two hundred and fifty families of this class, at the end of seven years—or twelve thousand pounds would establish in that time five hundred such families. As these families are estimated to include seven members each, five hundred such families would comprise a population of not less than three thousand five hundred persons.

Before I proceed to consider certain points which require to be examined with some care in respect to my proposed mode of dealing with these third class families, 1 wish to make an observation or two which apply equally to all those classes of settlers.

You will observe that I propose to furnish each family with a few sheep. This I deem important, as it will give the women of the families employment in the domestic manufacture of clothing for their families; and the families of all the Irish farmers and country labourers are skilful in making up flannels and friezes.

You will also observe that I propose that you should undertake the breaking up of their land for every family, doing a large proportion of the work with your own cattle, which cattle you afterwards, when the breaking is completed, distribute among your settlers—selling them—for the after-culture and other work connected with their farms. It is evident that the arrangement might be different: you might at once give your settlers each a yoke of oxen, some of them two yoke, and let them club together their cattle to make up the heavy breaking team, and exchange their own work—you furnishing some skilful Americans to work some of their teams, both as a help and an instruction to your settlers, who would not be familiar with that kind of work. This method might be adopted; but as the cost would not vary much, I prefer the other—because I think that this important work would be better done by being in your hands, and when matters are left to the mutual arrangements of poor people, and their mutual exchanges, many arrangements fall through, and almost as much time is lost in looking after and contriving the exchanges as is expended in the work which they are meant to promote.

And now to consider certain important points relating to the plan I have proposed for dealing with your third class settlers, whose whole expenses of conveyance you should bear. Two questions obviously arise:—First, is the plan effectual in creating for you a fair security for your expenditure, according as that expenditure is incurred? Secondly, what is to become of the portions of families left behind when the father or other male member has gone out as pioneer?

As to the first question I will answer it by following the settler and observing how he and you stand from the time you first take him up, until you bring his whole family out to him. You first take himself out at a cost of £7 10s. lie certainly has it in his power to leave you the moment lie has got out, and thus cheat you of the £7 10s.; but his object must be to get out his family, and, until he does get them out, to have them well taken care of at home. If he now leaves you he can not get out his family in many years by his own unaided exertions, and he will lose the benefit of your undertaking to take charge of them at home. If he remains with you and is industrious he can have some of his family out in a few months, and all of them out with him in twelve months. There can be no doubt then that he will remain with you. Towards the end of summer he has fifteen acres of his forty-acre lot broken up, and ten of it sown in wheat; he has a crop of potatoes and some Indian corn; and he has besides earned say thirty or forty dollars in wages from you over and above the cost of his support. If his family at home be such that they could now spare a boy of fourteen or fifteen, or a boy and girl, it would be well that these should be sent out to him towards the close of summer. The advantage of this would be obvious; though for simplicity I have made my calculations above on the supposition of the father being alone throughout the year. During the autumn and winter the father is employed in fencing his farm; by steady work he should be able to have his forty acres fenced in the fall and winter, and also to have his logs page 44 prepared for his log-house. Up to this time your expenditure on his account has been 138 dollars, and if you look to the items of it you will find every penny of it invested in the land except the thirty-five dollars paid for his expenses out; and you will find also invested in the land his whole labour throughout the year save for such time as he has worked for you for wages. Up to this time you are certainly more than secured in any expenditure you have incurred for him. You now take out his family. When you have done this—helped to build his log-house—given him a cow, sheep, and pigs, and helped him to break up more land—he is in your debt three hundred and forty-one dollars, and you are secured by a farm of forty acres all fenced and ploughed, with a log-house, such cattle as you have placed in his hands, and a crop nearly ripe, consisting of ten acres of wheat and five acres of Indian corn, besides some crop in the newly broken land. Now let us see what this is worth at the lowest possible estimate:—

	Dollars.
The log-house is certainly worth	40
The land has cost you	50
The breaking-up of forty acres would cost	80
The fencing of forty acres could not cost less than	80
The cow, pigs, and sheep have cost you	23
The wheat and Indian corn crops, even unharvested, are certainly worth not less than	100
Besides these he has potatoes and corn planted in his newly ploughed ground which we will not count.
	373

This is altogether independent of the enhanced value which has accrued both to the actual forty-acre farm occupied by this settler and to the adjoining lands from the presence of the large settlement that has come on to them, which cannot be estimated at less than 100 dollars for every family brought in. It is evident then that after you have paid for the conveyance of the settler's family you still stand much better than on equal terms with him; and it is your fault if you do not make such arrangements then and thenceforth as shall make it certain that whatever change afterwards takes place in your mutual position shall only be to make the debt bear a decreasing proportion to the security.

The ordinary wages paid to farm labourers in the United States (and indeed in Canada also) last year was ten and twelve dollars a month for the whole year (that is from £25 to £30 a year) and board and lodging with the farmer's family. You see that this value of labour, hired to make a profit on it, quite consists with the results anticipated above from the labour of a farmer employed upon his own farm.

And now to answer the question: "What is to become of the families, or such portion of the families as are left behind after the pioneer labourers have gone out?" The answer to this is not difficult. There are crowds of unemployed labourers who find nothing profitable to do; and finding nothing profitable to do, can, of course, contribute nothing to the maintenance of the families to which they belong. It may not be mathematically true that any labourer is page 45 absolutely doing nothing throughout the whole year, for he gets little odd jobs of work, and he keeps doing something at certain seasons upon the spot of land that constitutes the permanent holding of the family; but it is true that when he belongs to a large family every thing he does could be done by the other members of the family though he were away; and the family need not, even for the time, suffer any serious injury, if he separates from them for a year, in order to make a home for that family in a better country. This proposition—that one labourer out of the family can be spared without loss—is unfortunately true of a very considerable proportion of Irish labouring families, at all events in the impoverished districts; but its practical applicability can be very readily extended to a much wider range of families, by the adjustments and arrangements which it is very easy for a landlord to make, especially under the present circumstances of estate management. The poor law imposes upon you the obligation of supporting families who cannot support themselves. On your estate, as is also done on many others, you anticipate the mandates of that law by borrowing money under the Land Improvement Act, and giving employment to a large number of labourers upon reproductive works, which of course occasions you no ultimate loss. But though you borrow large sums of money and employ great numbers, you are unable to employ all. There are many families comprising two labourers from which no doubt you employ only one labourer, leaving the other unemployed; as to the boys, whose labour in America would be almost as valuable as the men's, I suppose you can seldom employ them at all. These, then, are the families that would exactly suit. Let the unemployed labourer (again, I say, the father, if possible,) go out; and when he has got fairly to work, send out one or two of the boys of his family to him—or even some of the girls, if boys are not to be had. The boys that would be idle and an encumbrance at home would be almost as valuable as the man himself in America, and would greatly increase the amount of improvements made within the year upon the farm. Even the girls that would be an encumbrance in Ireland could either be made directly useful in helping to make a home for the family, or service could be found for them. Thus, although I have only estimated for one of the family going out the first year, it is clear that as much as one-half the family might go out, with advantage to them, and without any too great risk to you, and with the effect of greatly lightening the encumbrance to you at home. It would be only necessary that, with the weaker part of the family which remained at home there should remain some male member or members sufficient to earn them a subsistence, and to give them aid and protection in afterwards going out to join their father. It is obvious that you should positively undertake that the family at home should not be left to want. They should be secured in the possession of their house and their small holding, until the time would come for their joining the father of the family; and they should be made sure of a certain amount of employment, sufficient to subsist them in, at least, as much comfort as they could reasonably expect to have enjoyed if their father had still remained with them. It is obvious from what page 46 I have said, that although the weakest members of the family would not go out for a year, the weight of the family might be greatly lightened within a few months after the father's departure. You might sometimes be put to trouble in making the necessary adjustments and arrangements at home, in order to effectuate this plan; you might have to put up with an inferior labourer, or to give wages to boys or lads where you had been in the habit of employing only men; but whatever trouble or disadvantage this entailed on you, would be a cheap price paid for overcoming that great difficulty of all schemes of self-paying colonization—the cost of passage.

You will see that in this plan a great variety of adjustments are practicable. Say that it is not possible to divide a certain family on the precise principle that I have suggested. Well, then, that family has probably another, or several other families, on your estate, related to them, who will be willing, in order to enable their friends to emigrate, to take charge of some of their children until the next year, particularly, if in consideration of their doing so you give them some advantages of employment, or some privilege for that year with regard to the holding of the emigrating family. These children could go out with the families emigrating in the next year, perhaps with the very family that harboured them for that year. This would be an easy arrangement. Again, I would not make my plan so rigid as in all cases with regard to those third class families to refuse to take out more than one person in the first instance. For instance, if a family consisted of a father, mother, and five young children, I would have no hesitation in saying you might take out, in the first instance, the father, mother, and the youngest child, if they could distribute the other children among friends until the succeeding year. You would be quite safe in doing so.

This plan of separating the members of a family, might at first be received with hesitation and disfavour by the labourers; but I feel confident that, wherever, from the general dealings of the landlord and his agent, the people had reason to confide in them as regards their promise in favour of the family left at home, all hesitation would soon disappear. I have frequently been consulted by intending emigrants. Whenever they have had no friends in America, I have always advised them, whatever were their means—(unless indeed these were large enough to make the expenses of staying with their whole family some weeks or months at taverns, while they looked about them, a matter of indifference)—I have always advised them to send out some members of their family a year before the rest, to provide a home to which the body of the family might go straight upon their arrival without incurring either the ruinous expense of taverns or the necessity of making a precipitate and unadvised choice of a farm. I cannot therefore think that to labouring families anxious to emigrate, but able to do nothing to help themselves, and whose whole expenses you should advance, it will be deemed on consideration either a hard or an offensive proposal that you should ask them to do likewise.

For conducting this plan on a large scale, it is evident that you would need a resident agent of a very superior stamp—a man of page 47 great trustworthiness, a man of great zeal in the enterprise, man of great experience in these new countries, who could do everything that needed to be done in the most effective and economica way at once, without waiting to learn how to do it, while your capital was running to waste and your enterprise to ruin—without in fact acquiring his experience by experimenting at your cost.

The selection of an agent is a point of great importance and no small difficulty. To a proprietor having connexions in America, through whom the ability and integrity of an agent could be vouched to him, the matter would be comparatively easy; but this is an advantage which few proprietors would be found to possess. Still if this enterprise were worth undertaking at all, it will strike you that there are many ways in which this difficulty might be overcome. There are many gentlemen of character, high position, and great business experience in the western country who would undertake the conduct of such an enterprise, and who would probably think four or five hundred pounds a year a sufficient remuneration for conducting it on a very large scale. On this point liberality would certainly be your best policy, if you could once satisfy yourself as to the man.

But a proprietor might even use an old country man as his agent, provided that old country man would take care to associate with him an American of great local experience, familiarly acquainted with the sort of business that would have to be transacted, and generally versed in the dealings common in those new countries. Such men are to be had everywhere in the west, of great intelligence, wonderful practical sagacity and resource, making little show or pretension, and who would act for quite a moderate compensation; not the sort of men to whom you would intrust the sole guidance of your enterprise, but men who would constitute a very perfect supplement to an old country man of general practical ability. One hundred and fifty pounds a year would command the services of a very competent man of this sort. The proprietor might send out as chief agent a person with whoso general ability and trustworthiness he was himself acquainted—perhaps a member of his own family. The principal requisite in such a man, besides general intelligence and integrity, should be that he should know how much he had to learn. A self-sufficient, precipitate man, who had not the modesty of mind to learn, would make your enterprise a ruin from the commencement.

As to the whole amount of capital required to carry out the plan, it is easily calculated from the materials I have already given, when you know the number of families who would desire to emigrate, and whose emigration you would desire to assist. Suppose the number of families to be 1,000, a great number, and comprising a very great population—6,000 or 7,000 persons, (seeing that you should always give the preference to large families,) the capital requisite to be employed in directly establishing 320 of these families in the first year, and the remainder of the thousand in the five or six ensuing years, would be about £24,000. But besides the capital employed in the direct outlay of establishing each family, at £75 per family as above estimated, two other capitals would be necessary. In the first place, page 48 you should always have on hand a much larger quantity of land than would be requisite for the immediate use of settlers. You should be able to give each of them ultimately at least a second forty-acre lot, at an advanced price of course. This advance of price would constitute your fund for covering various expenses. It is evident that a great enhancement of value would accrue from your settlement to a far greater quantity of land than was likely to be needed, either immediately or ultimately, for occupation by your own settlers. A very large capital might therefore be employed to a very great advantage in making large purchases of land—to such advantage that it is very little to say that the capital thus employed would double itself in about three years; that is, that in about three years the land immediately contiguous to the settled land could be sold for two-and-a-half dollars an acre. The greater the capital therefore used for this purpose (within certain very wide limits), the greater would be that fund upon which I have suggested that you should rely for indemnification for agencies, contingencies, and casual losses. I feel assured that £24,000 being employed as I have suggested, in the direct settlement of the families, as much as £20,000 more might be employed collateral to it in the purchase of lands, with a moral certainty that these lands could be sold for double the cost price of them, within, say four years after the purchase. I believe that nine out of ten Americans whom you might consult upon the subject, would tell you that it would be quite within reason to expect that £20,000 worth of carefully selected land, purchased in connexion with such an amount of colonization as might be effected with £24,000, would, within four years, sell for three or four times the cost price; but I am anxious to be clear within the truth. (Either of these suppositions would go far to controvert the admission that I made at the commencement of the paper, that such an enterprise as the one I describe could not be made to pay if undertaken as an ordinary commercial enterprise). I do not contemplate, however, that you should employ so large a capital for this purpose, although I am persuaded that the doing so would make the enterprise result in a very large profit. Your object would be, not to make a profit but to effect the colonization without loss, and with the employment of the least possible capital. Probably, then, the employment of £6,000, vested in the purchase of land not immediately occupied by your settlers would serve this purpose; though in all that you declined to invest thus between that sum and £20,000 you would unquestionably throw away an opportunity of immensely profitable investment, created by you, to be picked up by any persons to whom the good luck might befall. Let us say, then, that it would require another capital of £6,000 for investment in this way. Besides the two capitals mentioned, you would require another capital for a farming establishment to be occupied and managed by your agent. I mean that, to conduct in the most effective and economical manner the operation I have described, your agent should have a large farm, with sheds of considerable extent, though rude and cheaply put together, for the winter accommodation of a very large number of cattle; and also barns suited to the extent of the farm, which in summer would give page 49 temporary shelter to your settlers and their families as they arrived out, and before their own houses were built. Your agent should also have a number of American workmen employed, whom you would mingle among your settlers to direct and instruct them. A great part of the capital thus employed would be constantly, so to speak, running and flowing into the capital that is comprised in the estimates for the direct outlay on settlers. For instance, it would be found to identify itself with the items set down for provisions, pigs, seed wheat, seed potatoes, &c., which you would in fact not purchase, but would raise upon your own farm; and with no inconsiderable per centage of that set down for cows, sheep, and oxen. It is not to be thought that that separation of capital which I have marked out so distinctly, for the sake of clearness of exclamation, would exist with the same precision in practice as I have described it in this paper. Perhaps the additional capital that would be required by your agent's establishment, over and above what my be taken to be already included in the estimate of direct expenditure on your settlers, might amount, at a rough guess, to £3,000. see that for establishing 1,000 families, comprising a population of about 7,000 persons, within a period of seven or eight years, the requisite capital would be, say £24,000 to be employed in the direct outlay, as estimated at £75 for each family; £6,000 to be kept invested in lands not yet occupied; and about £3,000 for your agency establishment; that is in all about £33,000.

I have estimated for 1,000 families as a round number convenient for calculation, not that I suppose that upon any, even a very large estate, so many families would be found desirous of emigrating; probably even on the large estate that you manage, 500 families would be as many as would be desirous to go out. About £17,000 would be sufficient capital to establish this latter number in the manner I have been describing. The estimates of expenses and repayments that I have given you are not made at random, nor have they been put together in the closet; they are the result of estimates discussed, conned over, and examined at all points, with great numbers of settlers on the prairies, Irish, American, English and Scotch, as I visited them on their farms, sat with them in their log huts, and walked with them over their fields, or melt and conversed with them at way-side taverns in the interior of the prairie country of Illinois and Wisconsin, when I was travelling through these regions in the months of September and October last, for the special purpose of satisfying myself on these points.

I visited an English settlement about 120 miles in the interior of Wisconsin. What I learned at that settlement thoroughly confirmed the views which I had already conceived—that to furnish your settlers with an incomplete outfit, would be to bring upon yourself the very imminent peril of a complete loss. The settlement that I allude to, Gorseville, situate some thirty-five miles west from Madison, was the effort of an English Temperance Association. It has proved, I regret to say, a failure; but so many causes conspired to make that failure inevitable from the commencement, that it is a wonder that the settlement ever had existence, much more that it should have 120 families to show upon the spot; who are all, I was informed, page 50 doing very well for themselves, though not well for the society. It may be interesting to allude to the causes that led to the failure of this settlement. The people who went out were mostly people who had never worked upon land until they went there—this in itself was a sufficient cause of failure. Then each settler was to be a tenant of the association at a yearly rent for ten years; until the expiration of those ten years no settler could obtain a deed of his land. This long interval left of course ample room for doubts and apprehensions as to all the probable accidents that might arise in that time to interfere with the settler's ever getting a clear title to his farm at all; especially as the trustees resided in England, and the ultimate conveyance of the farms was to ensue, and be, it must be feared, in some degree dependent, on the winding up of the affairs of the society. The dissatisfaction, discontent, and refractoriness that this arrangement was likely to create are obvious. Then, the settlers themselves were all members of the association. When some, from inability, failed to pay their stipulated rent, and the subscription due by them as members of the association, others who were able to pay refused to pay because these parties had not paid; and when the agent attempted to eject them from the lands for non-payment of rent, it was decided at the trial, that by the constitution of the society, all its members (the defendant in ejectment included,) were tenants in common, and of course no one had a right to eject another. As respects the settlers who arrived out after this decision, this latter mischief was remedied by adopting a new form of lease, under which the tenants were stopped from denying their tenancy; but you see there were too many elements of failure in the original plan of this settlement to have allowed at any time any reasonable hopes of success. But to one element of failure I wish to point your special attention. The plan of the association was, that the settlers should convey themselves to the settlement where they were to find certain preparations made for them. Those preparations were intended to help persons forward who would come out with some means, not to be a sufficient reliance for persons who would come out destitute of all means. But the society in England had published letters received from parties who had gone out and located themselves in partially settled districts of Wisconsin, which stated (with sufficient truth as regards persons about to establish themselves as labourers in these partially settled places), that families once arrived in Wisconsin could do very well, though they had arrived without a cent in their pockets. Intending emigrants to the Gorseville settlement took all this as true in all situations and places, and for all purposes; and accordingly they arrived at Gorseville, to commence farming, without a cent in their pockets, depending wholly on the preparations made for them by the society. Now, the preparations made were as follows:—An eighty-acre farm was provided for each settler, on which a small substantial log-house, costing fifty dollars (10 guineas), was put up, and five acres were ploughed, sown in wheat, and fenced. This was done at a cost of 200 dollars, that is, 100 dollars for the land, 50 dollars for the log-house, and 50 dollars for breaking, seeding, harrowing, and fencing five acres of wheat. This gave the settler nothing to help him towards his immediate support page 51 save the house; and nothing at all to help in the after-culture of his farm. To get along, he wanted a cow, he wanted pigs, he wanted implements, he wanted working cattle, and he wanted provisions. Wanting all these, and arriving out for a great part without any means whatever of their own, the settlers had to disperse to more settled parts of the country—fifteen, twenty, and thirty miles distant—to seek employment and earn as well their subsistence, as the first necessaries for the commencing of farming operations. While they did this their farms were of course neglected; and even the crop put in by the association was in many instances destroyed by cattle breaking in upon it. This disabled the persons who thus suffered from paying any rent, and other evils stated above followed. You see that this last element of failure had its origin in the inadequate outfit of the settlers. What it was hoped that they would provide for themselves, they came unable to provide; and consequently the benefit even of the preparation made by the society was lost upon them. An inadequate outfit is a very bad economy; and it is an economy to which there is very little temptation, when it is considered that an adequate outfit enables the settler to use to the very best advantage that most valuable of all articles in America, the labour of himself and family; and by so doing enables him to make you early and large repayments, which may go again to the establishment of new settlers.

You will scarcely think that the sums I have set down as necessary for conveying families out and establishing them upon farms are exorbitant, when you consider that it has cost other landlords £40 a family merely to convey the families out to Upper Canada, bringing them there to seek employment as labourers, which £40 was of course a total loss; while on the plan I suggest, by expending £75 on each family, you establish the family on a farm and have the £75 repaid so rapidly that the instalments being used for the establishment of new settlers, the £75 will in the course of six or seven years have carried out and established, not one family, but three families. Add to this, that it will ultimately be returned to you with interest.

By referring to the evidence of Mr. Brydone, given before the Committee of the Lords, on "Colonization for Ireland," sitting in 1847, you will see that the emigrants sent out by Colonel Wyndham to Upper Canada, in the year 1839, cost him no less than £12 per statute adult, which was at the rate of £60 per family of five statute adults—the number of statute adults per family that I have estimated for. This excessive expense, however, was brought about by an accident. If that accident had not occurred, it was estimated that the expense would have been £8 per statute adult; that is £40 per family of five statute adults (see Mr. Brydone's evidence—query 1234, 1235). Colonel Wyndham afterwards sent out other emigrants who seem not to have cost him more than £22 per family; but I conjecture from the evidence, which is rather indistinct on this point, that he did not bear the whole expene of these families. Lord Palmerstown sent out emigrants last year at about £22 per family, the family averaging six and a half persons, perhaps four statute adults (see Mr. Kincaid's evidence—query 1,404). page 52 These families were only landed at Quebec. The fate of the unfortunate people sent out in this way is too notorious. The families sent out by Government and established upon farms near Peterborough, in Upper Canada, in the year 1825, cost £105 per family for their conveyance out and their establishment, (see Mr. Godley's evidence query 1,740;—see also Mr. Rubige's evidence).

As to the cost of forming settlements in America, there is a general tendency in the popular opinion (that is the opinion that is formed, whether by the literate or illiterate, without sufficient calculation), both in this country and in America, greatly to underrate the amount. In this country even practical men are apt to think, that, the settler once arrived in America, there is little further expense required but to procure him a few acres of land at some very small cost; and they therefore talk as if there were no expense worth considering to be incurred in making settlements save the expense of taking the settlers out. In America, again, converse with even practical men on the subject, and until you direct their attention especially to the point, you will find that they only think of the cost of the after settlement, omitting to take into account the expense of conveyance to America at all. Their habit is to consider the emigrants as already arrived. When stating, in reply to the inquiries of Americans, the horrible sufferings of the poor of this country from the famine of last year, I have constantly been asked," Why don't they come here," the questioners never taking time to reflect that the family that was perishing for want of a shilling to procure them one day's food in Ireland, were scarcely likely to be able to procure £30 or £40 to carry them to Illinois or Wisconsin. Thus the popular (I should rather say the unreflecting), opinion on each side of the Atlantic would reduce the cost of forming settlements to one-half the amount actually required; each set of people leaving out of consideration that half of the expenditure that is farthest removed from their own observation. Another way in which the expenditure necessary for the formation of settlements is made less of by persons giving flying opinions in America is this: they are familiarly aware of the very small amount of ready means with which an individual family of settlers going into a half settled country thinks it necessary to provide themselves. They do not reflect that this settler whom they take as the standard of their estimate, works half his time with persons who have been settled before him, thereby earning himself provisions, the work of cattle, &c., and turning to his use, by a fair exchange of his labour, the capital which he finds realised in the possession of settlers who have preceded him. It does not occur to them that a considerable body of settlers cannot avail them of this means of helping themselves along. A large colony which would procure lands at the upset government price must be taken into the wilderness where no settlers have preceded them, where they will have no neighbours but each other; and they must therefore have, within themselves, all the resources that will be necessary to their progress. Whatever the individual settler going into a partially settled country relics on earning from others, all that, your colonists, going to a totally unsettled neighbourhood, must possess within themselves.

You will observe that in my estimates for your settlers I have not included horses or waggons;—oxen and sleds must serve them for a time. Horses and waggons however would be acquisitions very early made by such of your settlers as would be distinguished by industry, and what the Americans call "shift." But the presence of some few horses and several waggons would, for some purposes, be an almost indispensable necessity in your settlement from the commencement You would of course have a number of horses and waggons at your own agency establishment, and no doubt many persons would be found among your first class settlers who would be possessed of means, some of considerable means, after defraying the expense of their own and their family's conveyance. These parties would of course have horses and waggons from the outset; and for the occasional purposes for which they would be necessary for the other settlers, they would of course be at their command in exchange for labour, which the better circumstanced settlers would stand quite as much in need of for their larger harvests, as their poorer neighbours would need the use of waggons or horses for special occasions.

I wish to call your attention to the peculiar facilities afforded by prairie lands for the immediate provisioning of a settlement. Any quantity of potatoes can be planted the first year, they will he ripe for your settlers in the middle of August, and they will thenceforth supply not only food for your settlers, but food also for pigs and cattle. Notwithstanding the potato disease, the crop will be sufficiently reliable to secure you a large quantity of human food,—and also a large supply of pork, in the first year. The portion of tlie land that is earliest ploughed can also be planted with Indian corn which will produce about half a crop in the first year. Buckwheat will also grow in the newly broken land. Then, as I have already said, the prairie grass not only feeds cattle but fattens them, and also sheep, Hay also is to be had on the prairies for the mowing of it. Thus, in the very first summer, within a few months after your settlers have arrived, you have, of your own produce, potatoes in any quantity; a reasonable quantity of Indian corn and buck wheat; of pork, beef, and mutton, you have all that you may desire to feed; and you have abundance of winter provender prepared for your cattle.

There is an important point to which, in proceeding with a settlement, on a large scale, you should pay especial attention. You should assist your settlers during the first few years to support a clergyman of their own religious persuasion. Your settlers would, I presume, be for the most part Catholic. Their own numbers and their progress in wealth would in a few years make them quite independent of any extraneous assistance towards supporting their clergyman; but for the first two or three years some aid in this way would be peculiarly grateful and valuable to them; and even taking into account your own interests only, such aid would be well bestowed. It could not fail to be advantageous to you to secure a religious and moral influence among your settlers. It would also render your settlement attractive to Irish Catholics already residing in the country. To the Irish Catholics in America, no one attraction towards a place of settlement is so great as the presence there of a page 54 Catholic clergyman. This is one of the reasons why it is observed that the Irish in America cling to towns and cities, and do not disperse through the country. They will not go beyond the reach of the ministrations of their religion. But wherever a Catholic clergyman is once established, there the Irish settlers will congregate in numbers, flocking to that place from all quarters. Being at Chicago lately I heard of an Irish settlement nearly fifty miles west of that place. I understood that it had been established by a Catholic, a native of Massachusets, who had brought with him a number of Catholic Irish from that State. I visited it under this impression, and called upon Mr. Tyler, the person who was said to have founded it. I found him a plain working farmer. He told me it was a mistake when it was said that lie had brought in any settlers. The real fact was, that he and I think three of his brothers, all Catholics, were among the first settlers in that district. He and his brothers shortly after their arrival secured the occasional visits of a Catholic clergyman. This attracted the Irish. Soon a Catholic clergyman was permanently fixed there. The attraction became greater of course, and there is now a very populous Irish Catholic settlement in this place.

You should also assist for a year or two in the support of schools; in this you would be largely helped by the government school fund of whatever State your settlement would be located in.

Another point to which you should attend would be, to give some encouragement to a medical man well acquainted with the diseases of the western country to settle in your district. Your settlers would arrive so poor that for a time they could offer but slender prospects of emolument to a practitioner; and unless you stepped in to aid them they might at first find themselves totally destitute of medical services.

To meet those public expenditures and the expenses of agency, and also to cover some casual losses from which you could not expect to be exempt, I am confident, as I have already stated, that you would find an ample fund in the sale of reserved lands, whether to strangers or to your own settlers, at a moderate advance upon their first-cost price. Speculations in wild lands are uncertain when the parties purchasing have no power to direct towards them the tide of immigration; but to a party holding in his own hand the sluices of population to direct the current where he will, the speculation becomes a certainty, provided he is content to sell for a moderate advance in price. The price of government land in the United States is so low, (a dollar and a quarter an acre,) that even a considerable advance upon it still leaves the price within the limits of what a settler can well afford to pay, if it were only for the accommodation of having his existing farm enlarged by the addition of land contiguous or nigh to it—leaving altogether out of account the general enhancement that takes place wherever a settlement, with the roads, schools, churches, mills, mechanics' shops, and merchants' stores that pertain to it as the necessary incidents of its growth, exists. A few years would elapse before this fund would begin to be realized—probably two years or three—and the expenses which I have counted that it should meet must at first be paid out of capital. This, you will say, puts the calculations I have made as to what page 55 could be done with a certain amount of capital so far astray, it is, of course, so. The fact is, that nothing could be done with the mathematical accuracy that, for sake of clearness and brevity, I have set down in my figures. For instance, the number of settlers that you could establish each year would not in practice proceed in the regular way that I have calculated in my figures; you could not buy your lands just as you wanted them, but should buy in one year what you would probably need in two or three. Whenever, therefore, you had to make new purchases of lands, in that year you could establish fewer settlers than usual. Whenever you had no land to buy, but only to establish your settlers on lands already purchased, in that year, of course, you could establish a good deal above the average number of settlers. My figures are only intended to indicate general results; and the average of a few years would be found to show results not widely differing from what those figures set forth.

Especial care should be taken in the selecting of your land. You should first seek a district of good land that was open for entry. You can purchase by quantities as small as lots of eighty acres each. You should carefully exclude from your purchase every eighty-acre lot, that was inferior, either from its general quality, or from having any considerable proportion of its surface taken up by unprofitable land. The whole scheme might most easily be ruined by injudicious selections of land. You might light upon a district presenting a largo unbroken tract of uniform good land, in which case, the district once determined on, the after selection would be matter of little trouble. But you might have to make your selections in a district where it would be necessary to pick and cull a good deal. In the latter case care and time would be required, as the purchasing of any considerable proportion of bad land would involve a loss that no after management could retrieve. It is quite curious to observe the very injudicious selections that are sometimes actually made, even at times when the whole country is open to the selectors to choose from. I have seen a man, who had come into the country with property, ruined by having located himself on the margin of a picturesque lake, where the land was light and unprofitable, while settlers who had come in long after him and located themselves upon other land not over a mile distant—which he had passed over because the scenery was tame, though the soil was fertile and productive—had grown independent and wealthy. The utmost care, then, should be taken in selecting the lands. This might require some considerable time, and you could not count upon making any large settlement in the same year in which you would make your selections. Indeed, independently of any consideration of the season at which you could have your selections complete, you could not bring in any great number of colonists in the same year in which you had made your selection of lands, as you should have some preparations previously made for their reception. It would be desirable, or almost necessary, on many accounts, to have some small settlement made the year previous to that on which any large number of settlers would be brought in.

So far I have spoken of lands that were to be purchased at government price; to procure which, of eligible quality, and in large quantity, you should go to a considerable distance from the page 56 lake shore; but your operations are not necessarily confined to those lands. In the United States, as elsewhere, speculators have purchased up large and desirable tracts of land that were remote from market a few years ago, when the purchases were made, but which industry, and civilization, and markets are fast coming up with. These lands have been bought on the speculation of selling them again, as early as possible, at an advanced price. The great object and the great difficulty of every large land-speculator is, to have the beginning of a settlement made on or near his lands. A speculator would, therefore, deal on the most favourable terms with any person who could commence such a settlement on his lands. If such a person took, say, one-half his land, he would give him that quantity, on condition of his settling it, at two-thirds or one-half the price that any isolated settler would have to pay him for a farm from the remaining portion. Besides this, the habit of private parties in selling lands is, not to expect more than a small portion of the price paid down, and to take the remainder in instalments; and further, the security taken for these instalments is usually a mortgage back of the land itself—on the agreement, that should the instalments fail to be paid, the seller shall have no recourse to the purchaser, as for a personal debt, but shall look to the land only. This agreement is either express or implied. By the law of most of the Western States it is the implied agreement whenever the mortgage does not contain a special covenant for repayment, and is unaccompanied by a bond. Under these circumstances, it is plain that by dealing with private owners of large tracts of land the following consequences would result:—First, you could procure for your settlers lands nearer to a market, by thirty, forty, or fifty miles, than if you had purchased government lands. Secondly, you and your settlers should pay a higher price for your lands, but you would pay it for the most part in instalments, as you received those instalments from your own settlers; and your settlers being so much nearer to a market would receive so much higher a price for their produce that they could easily pay the heavier instalments induced by the higher price of the land. Thirdly, so far as the price of the land was concerned, you need not incur any personal liability in standing between the landowner and the settler, as you would generally find the landowner willing, in selling to you, to look to the improved land as his sole security. Fourthly, in thus dealing with a private landowner you would lose the opportunity of creating a fund to cover expenses and losses by purchasing the lands adjacent to your settlement and selling them when enhanced in value:—But you would have another fund. The landowner would, as I have said, sell to you, on condition of your bringing in a settlement, at a much lower price than he would sell to isolated settlers. He would sell to you for two and a half or three dollars an acre, what he would not sell to the others for less than five dollars; you might, therefore, charge your settlers say one dollar an acre advance upon the price you paid yourself, and they would still and that they got the land cheaper by a dollar than they could procure it from any one else in the neighbourhood. Fifthly, it is plain that this plan would require a smaller capital by about £6,000, on an operation of the extent that I have been calculating on above, than the plan of purchasing page 57 government lands; as yon need not, in this plan, purchase and land but as you needed it for your settlers. In fact, in proceeding in this way you would have the landowner in a certain sense and toa certain extent for your partner in the enterprise, virtually advancing a portion of the requisite capital—the portion needed for the purchase of lands—and participating in the profits realised upon that portion.

I feel confident that after the nature and object of your operations had become known in the country, there is no conceivable modification of agreement, within reason, into which you would not find capitalists who had invested or were willing to invest their money in lands ready to enter with you. I am confident that you could make such agreements with capitalists as would leave all your own capital free for the establishment of settlers, while the capitalists not only found the whole capital required for the purchase of land but also built mills, brought on artisans, and encouraged the settlement of all those smaller capitalists who are necessary for giving motion to the trade of a district; at the same time of course giving you such advantages as would create a fund for covering your expenses and casualties. This would lead to a still further reduction of the capital which it would be necessary for you to employ; but it would be a sort of thing that you could not find at once ready to your hand;—it would grow up.

The choice between purchasing government lands or dealing with private parties possessing lands nearer to market, should depend on the character of those opportunities of dealing with private parties that might from time to time present themselves. If the desirable opportunities that would sometimes offer could be had always at the moment they were needed, it would be your advantage to deal always with private parties, as you could thus accomplish the same ends by the employment of a much smaller capital.

I would say, then, in recapitulation, that if all the parties who desired to emigrate could pay their own expenses, and were content to settle themselves as labourers your expenses on their account need be very trifling—probably 30s. a family would cover all the expenses you need incur for them. The labour market of the United States is capable of absorbing all the healthy labourers that are at all likely to arrive there from Europe.

But if you are compelled to bear all the expenses of conveyance of the parties to America, the expense is then enormous—not less than £30 or £40 a family; and if they are merely thrown on the labour market, all this must be a dead loss; so that if you would enable a thousand such families to emigrate it must cost you from £30,000 to £40,000, according to the size of the families. If you would settle those parties, however, on farms, and manage in the manner I have suggested, you could recover all your money back again; and although you must expend upon each family about £35 beyond the mere cost of conveyance, still a capital of £33,000 would, not all at once, but in the course of seven or eight years, convey out and settle 1,000 of the largest families, pay its own interest all the time, and in the end be refunded without the loss of one shilling. If you dealt for your land with private landowners, a capital of £27,000 would effect the same operation.

Again, if your emigrants were mixed—some able to pay their own expenses, others not able to pay any—I am confidently of opinion, that having to undertake the whole of the expenses of some parties, you would find that there no longer existed for you the possibility of settling as mere labourers, at a small cost to yourself, those parties who could pay their own expenses. No persons would acknowledge that they had the means of paying their own expenses, if the consequence was to be that they should be placed at a disadvantage as compared with those who could pay no part of their expenses. They would either deny having the means they possessed, or else they would stay at home until they had spent them, and had thus qualified themselves to claim the superior advantages afforded to those who had nothing. If you undertook, therefore, to settle the poorest of your settlers upon farms, you should settle all upon farms. You must settle all as labourers, or you must settle all as farmers; and a mixed emigration, for reasons that I have already explained, would, I believe, require the use of as large a capital as an emigration consisting of the poorest families only.

I will compare, then, the cost of the two modes of settling 1,000 families, mixed as you describe, as labourers or as farmers. They would consist probably of 250 families, who could pay all their own expenses of conveyance; 250 families who could pay one-half of these expenses; and 500 families who could contribute nothing towards these expenses.

To enable them or help them to settle themselves as mere labourers would cost as follows, even supposing that all those who had means would acknowledge that they had them, and would use them to pay or help in paying their expenses.

Thus, to settle 1,000 families such as you describe, merely as labourers, would cost £24,875, which would be all a dead loss; nor is it very likely that even this amount would cover the actual loss; for it is scarcely probable that if you were paying the whole expenses for 500 families, you would find 250 families ready to acknowledge that they needed no assistance from you, and 250 others willing to acknowledge that they could contribute one-half towards paying for themselves.

To settle the same families upon farms within seven or eight years would require, as I have just now stated, the use of a capital of about £33,000, which would all be ultimately repaid with interest. Or, if you found a good opportunity of dealing with private landowners, a capital of £27,000, or even less, would effect the operation.

The advantages, then, of settling emigrants such as you describe yours to be, on farms, according to the plan I propose, is obvious. The great disadvantage of this plan is, that the operation would not be complete for seven or eight years.

But this disadvantage does not exist by any means to the extent page 59 that might at first appear. At first sight it would seem that the money used to pay or assist in paying the expenses of parties who would settle themselves as labourers on their arrival, would secure at once, and without any delay, all the benefits expected from the emigration; but in practice you would not find that any very large emigration of this sort could really be carried out all at once; it must take some years at all events. If there be any district of country from which you count that one thousand families will be desirous of emigrating, you do not really mean that these thousand families are all desirous of starting off in the very first year, but that ultimately, and within a few years, a thousand families would probably desire to go. If there were any district from which a thousand families were in fact desirous of emigrating in the very first year, any practical man would draw thence the conclusion, that after they had gone and sent back tolerably good accounts to their friends and neighbours at home, little less than one thousand families more would be anxious to start in the second year; and that in a district whence such an outburst of emigration proceeded, there must be a scarcity of land and of employment, and a pressure of population that would require, in all, the emigration of three or four thousand families before a healthy equilibrium were restored. It is not probable that in any plan you would adopt, the whole number of families whose emigration you would design to promote would have emigrated in less than four or even five years; so that the superiority which the plan of merely placing the emigrants in the American labour market, possesses over the plan of settling them on farms, in this one point, its more rapid execution, and the more immediate realization of its advantages, is not even in that point by any means as great as it might at first appear. In all other points its inferiority is obvious.

So far I have spoken only of prairie land; but it is possible that a tract of timbered land might be found open for purchase, at government price, sufficiently attractive from its situation to induce you to prefer it to any prairie land that might be offering at the same time. The mention of such a probability may seem strange, after the very decided preference that I have already expressed for the prairie land; but the fact is, that however preferable the prairie land is, per se, in the course of settlement the two species of land find their level, as regards choice, in this way. The prairie land (when it can be had with a due proportion of timbered land near it,) is so desirable, and it is so accessible, that all the very good prairie land has been purchased up for fifty or sixty miles inland from the shore of the lake. The timbered land not being so desirable, and not so accessible, is left behind unpurchased in places within six, ten, and fifteen miles of ports upon the lake, or upon navigable rivers running into the lake; consequently, the choice open to the purchaser at present is not between timbered land and prairie, lying side by side, or in the same district, but between timbered land within ten or fifteen miles of a port, and prairie land fifty or seventy, or even eighty miles distant from it. Supposing the roads between either tract of land and the port to be equally good, the difference in marketable value of produce at the two places would be about 15 cents or 20 cents a bushel, upon wheat, page 60 which would make quite a large sum of money in the saleable surplus of a productive harvest. As a timbered farm, therefore, can be had so much nearer to navigation than you can get a prairie farm, the timbered farm, once it is cleared and the roads leading to it tolerably well opened, will become of much greater value from its situation than the prairie farm that can now be had at the same price. Besides this, there are some advantages which belong to timbered land over prairie land, independently of its situation. I have already alluded to them in a former part of this paper. The timbered land, on the whole, is of better quality; it will give all kinds of crops—grass as well as grain—and will make good pasture, which prairie land will not do, at least for many years; it is generally better watered, and the settler has his firewood, his building logs, and his fencing timber all upon his farm, without the trouble and cost of hauling them from a distance of one, two, or even three miles. Under such circumstances it is quite possible that you might find a tract of timbered land (not heavily timbered) so situated that, under all the circumstances of the case, you might prefer it to any tract of prairie then open to you. Your settlers would bring their land under the plough much more slowly; but when it was brought under, and the roads made, it would be a great deal more valuable: the quantity of produce raised by them would be much less—but what they did raise would fetch a higher price. In fact, all the disadvantages of timbered land might be overbalanced by the favourable situation in which you could procure it, added to the superior quality of the land when once cleared. Care should be taken, however, that it was not very heavily timbered: if it was heavily timbered the difficulties of it would overwhelm any set of old country colonists; and, as compared with prairie land, land heavily timbered would, in my opinion, be quite unlit for their occupation, whatever might be its advantages of situation. On timbered land, well chosen, the general result of an operation of settlement would be about the same as I have estimated it on prairie land, though brought about in rather a different way, and with some considerable difference in the circumstances. I will not now enter into these circumstances, nor into any estimates peculiarly applicable to timbered lands, as I feel that this paper has already grown to too great a length.

Permit me to forward to you a letter which I received not long since from the Honourable J. B. Doty, of Milwaukie, lately governor of the territory of Wisconsin. Governor Doty's letter is in reply to one from me asking his opinion as to the possibility of forming a self-paying settlement of families, all of whom would pay the cost of their own conveyance, at least, to the American seaport. You will observe Governor Doty's preference for timbered land; but you will also bear in mind, that the case I put to him "was of families who would pay all their own cost of conveyance, and there was no question to be considered as to obtaining repayment of the large sums that would be expended in carrying them out. If the question were put to him respecting parties for whom you should pay their whole cost of conveyance out, I feel confident that the same reasons which have influenced me would also influence him to a decided preference for the prairie lands.

The mere cost of settling families in any cheap way, so that they could begin to live, was the question to be considered; and Governor Doty conceives that families could be so settled with so small an outfit, and in so cheap a way, that the general enhancement of the lands which you should purchase and reserve for sale at an advanced price would in itself reimburse your expenses, even though the repayments from the settlers should altogether fail. I would suggest, that if you publish this letter of mine, you might very advantageously append to it an extract from Governor Doty's letter. Governor Doty's long acquaintance with the western country, his able, practical mind—which has secured him a high reputation in the United States, as a judge, a delegate to Congress, and, ultimately, governor of the territory of Wisconsin—combined with the special bent of his tastes, which have always inclined him to pay particular attention to matters that are kindred to this question, render him a very high authority on the subject. I have not ceased to regret that, after I had travelled two hundred miles specially to see him and converse with him on this subject, 1 lost the benefit of a personal communication with him, in consequence of a serious attack of fever under which I found him lying, when I reached his residence.

In tracing the plan of colonization suggested in this letter, I feel that I have been very diffuse; but the fact is, I have been anxious to develop as much as possible the reasons of my suggestions, and the elements of all my views, that I might thus furnish you rather with the materials of various plans, than with the rigid outline of any one. No one plan can be suited to all circumstances. You will easily sec from what I have said how great a variety of modifications any plan of emigration is susceptible of; and the views I have suggested, perhaps, more than the actual scheme that I have sketched, may aid you in constructing for yourself such a plan as may best suit all the circumstances of the emigration which you are interested in promoting.

In closing, allow me to say, that I am not one of those who look to systems of emigration as likely by themselves to prove, in any considerable degree, an efficient corrective of the evils of this country. Such systems can plainly be made vastly advantageous to the parties emigrating; and wherever, upon really over-crowded estates, it is desired to procure larger accommodation for men (and not for cattle), emigration can be made the means of serving the parties who remain behind by facilitating such re-arrangement of farms as may be necessary for this purpose. In the case of an individual proprietor, whose estate is not sufficiently extensive to afford the means of living to all the population who now occupy it, it is plainly the only remedy that, as an individual, he can use. Single-handed, he cannot stimulate general trade or manufactures, so as to absorb his people, but he can help them to emigrate. I am anxious that it should not be inferred from this letter that I join in the cry of over-population. Over-population was accounted the great source of evil in Ireland, when she numbered little over two millions of inhabitants. If her present eight millions were reduced back again to two, it would be a remedy for over-population strong enough to page 62 satisfy the most drastic practitioners; but what would it do, after all, but put the country back a century? I believe her disease is constitutional, and that other remedies than emigration are required for its eradication. I believe, however, that emigration may be made a most effective topical cure for certain topical sores.