Well, stranger, here you are all safe and sound;
You're now on shore. Methinks you look aghast, -
As if you'd made some slight mistake, and found
A land you liked not. Think not of the past;
Your leading-strings are cut; the mystic chain
That bound you to your fair and smiling shore
Is sever'd now, indeed. 'Tis now in vain
To sigh for joys that can return no more.
Emigration, however necessary as the obvious means of providing
for the increasing population of early-settled and over-peopled
countries, is indeed a very serious matter to the individual
emigrant and his family. He is thrown adrift, as it were, on a
troubled ocean, the winds and currents of which are unknown to him.
His past experience, and his judgment founded on experience, will
be useless to him in this new sphere of action. In an old country,
where generation after generation inhabits the same spot, the mental
dispositions and prejudices of our ancestors become in a manner
hereditary, and descend to their children with their possessions.
In a new colony, on the contrary, the habits and associations of
the emigrant having been broken up for ever, he is suddenly thrown
on his own internal resources, and compelled to act and decide at
once; not unfrequently under pain of misery or starvation. He is
surrounded with dangers, often without the ordinary means which
common-sense and prudence suggest of avoiding them, - because the
EXPERIENCE on which these common qualities are founded is wanting.
Separated for ever from those warm-hearted friends, who in his
native country would advise or assist him in his first efforts, and
surrounded by people who have an interest in misleading and imposing
upon him, every-day experience shows that no amount of natural
sagacity or prudence, founded on experience in other countries,
will be an effectual safeguard against deception and erroneous
conclusions.
It is a fact worthy of observation, that among emigrants possessing
the qualities of industry and perseverance so essential to success
in all countries, those who possess the smallest share of original
talent and imagination, and the least of a speculative turn of mind,
are usually the most successful. They follow the beaten track and
prosper. However humbling this reflection may be to human vanity,
it should operate as a salutary check on presumption and hasty
conclusions. After a residence of sixteen years in Canada, during
which my young and helpless family have been exposed to many
privations, while we toiled incessantly and continued to hope even
against hope, these reflections naturally occur to our minds, not
only as the common-sense view of the subject, but as the fruit of
long and daily-bought experience.
After all this long probation in the backwoods of Canada, I find
myself brought back in circumstances nearly to the point from
whence I started, and am compelled to admit that had I only
followed my own unassisted judgment, when I arrived with my wife
and child in Canada, and quietly settled down on the cleared farm
I had purchased, in a well-settled neighbourhood, and with the
aid of the means I then possessed, I should now in all probability
have been in easy if not in affluent circumstances.
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