tion from the year 1790 to 1850, the date of the last Census, estimated on the most careful grounds, not less than 15,000,000 are, he thinks, of the Anglo-Saxon race. If to these we add the 3,594,762 colored persons, whose increase of course is easily ascertainable, it will leave 4,668,736, of our own aggregate population of 23,263,498, to be divided among Irish, German, French, and other descent-a result which accords with the estimate of Bancroft, and with the common sense view of the subject. An analysis of this foreign population is then made with candor and skill, the process of which we cannot present. The results arrived at are contained in the following table, which will probably surprise many readers, and perhaps furnish a better estimate of the relative moral forces which are at work among us: Population of the United States in 1850,........ African, Irish,. German,........ French,......... .23,263,488 ..15,000,000 ..3,594,762 2,269,000 ..1,900,000 ....499,636 ..... Whole number of Immigrants between 1790 and 1850,. .2,759,329 .1,511,990 Whole number of Immigrants and descendants.......... .4,350,934 ....3,103,094 .....8,263,498 Total of all our population, exclusive of Anglo-Saxon blood,................................ Whatever the causes which have of late years produced this immense immigration into this country, it is certainly an undeniable fact, that "the palpable and admitted growing influence of the foreign born population of the United States has, for several years past, been a source of anxiety and dissatisfaction to a considerable number of our native citizens." This is so apparent that a writer on the subject of immigration, styling himself a foreigner, frankly admits it, and says: "The Kensington riots, the Southwark disturbances, and the present position of civil, political, and religious feeling, confirm the fact, and render it an important and interesting subject, worthy of the attention and candid consideration of us all." Another fact there is, to which he also refers, and which is probably as incontrovertible as the former, and that is, that "at least ninety out of every hundred of all the immigrants who come to the United States and the Canadas, have been driven to immigration by monarchical oppression, the laws of primogeniture and entail, special and partial legislation, unjust wars, and extravagant government expenditures, patronage and malfeasance-causes, concerning which they have a very imperfect knowledge, and over which they had little or no control." So far as Ireland is concerned, we have abundant evidence of the causes which have produced so large an immigration from that country. Kohl, the accomplished German traveller, who has visited and described most of the countries of Europe, and is now making a tour through the United States, admits in his book of Travels in Ireland, that he had no where found the poverty and wretchedness that prevailed among the people of Ireland. He says: "I remember, when I saw the poor Lettes in Lavonia, I used to pity them for having to live in huts built of the unhewn logs of trees, the crevices being stopped up with moss. I pitied them on account of their low doors, and their diminutive windows; and gladly would I have arranged their chimneys for them in a more suitable manner. Well, Heaven pardon my ignorance! I knew not that I should ever see a people on whom Almighty God had imposed yet heavier privations. Now that I have seen Ireland, it seems to me that the Lettes, the Esthonians, and the Finlanders, lead a life of comparative comfort, and poor Paddy would feel like a king with their houses, their habiliments, and their daily fare. "A wooden house, with moss to stop up its crevices, would be a palace in the wild regions of Ireland. Paddy's cabin is built of earth, one shovelful over the other, with a few stones mingled here and there, till the wall is high enough. But perhaps you will say, the roof is thatched or covered with bark. Ay, indeed! A few sods of grass, cut from a neighboring bog, are his only thatch. Well, but a window or two at least, if it be only a pane of glass fixed in the wall, or the bladder of some animal, or a piece of talc, as may often be seen in a Wallachian hut? What idle luxury were this! There are thousands of cabins in which not a trace of a window is to be seen; nothing but a little square hole in front, which doubles the duty of door, window, and chimney; light, smoke, pigs, and children, all must pass in and out of the same aperture! "A French author, Beaumont, who had seen the Irish peasant in his cabin, and the North American Indian in his wigwam, has assured us that the savage is better provided for than the poor man in Ireland. Indeed, the question may be raised, whether in the whole world a nation is to be found that is subjected to such physical privations as the peasantry in some parts of Ireland. This fact cannot be placed in too strong a light; for if it can once be shown that the wretchedness of the Irish population is without a parallel example on the globe, surely every friend of humanity will feel himself called on to reflect whether means may not be found for remedying an evil of so astounding a magnitude! "A Russian peasant, no doubt, is the slave of a harder master, but still he is fed and housed to his content, and no trace of mendicancy is to be seen in him. The Hungarians are certainly not among the best used people in the world; still, what fine wheaten bread, and what wine, has even the humblest among them for his daily fare! The Hungarian would scarcely believe it, if he were to be told there was a country in which the inhabitants must content themselves with potatoes every alternate day in the year. We look not for much luxury them poor and barbarous, but, They have a national costume, "Servia and Bosnia are reckoned among the most wretched countries of Europe, and certainly the appearance of one of their villages has little that is attractive about it; but at least the people, if badly housed, are well clad. or comfort among the Tartars of the Crimea; we call good heavens! they look at least like human creatures. their houses are habitable, their orchards are carefully tended, and their gaily-harnessed ponies are mostly in good condition. An Irishman has nothing national about him but his rags, his habitation is without a plan, his domestic economy without rule or law. We have beggars and paupers among us, but they form at least an exception: whereas, in Ireland, beggary or abject poverty is the prevailing rule. The nation is one of beggars, and they who are above beggary seem to form the exception. "The African negroes go naked, but then they have a tropical sun to warm them. The Irish are a little removed from a state of nakedness; and their climate, though not cold, is cool, and extremely humid. "The Indians in America live wretchedly enough at times, but they have no knowledge of a better condition, and, as they are hunters, they have every now and then a productive chase, and are able to make a number of feast days in the year. Many Irishmen have but one day on which they eat flesh, namely, on Christmas-day. Every other day they feed on potatoes, and nothing but potatoes. Now this is inhuman; for the appetite and stomach of man claim variety in food, and nowhere else do we find human beings gnawing from year's end to year's end, at the same root, berry, or weed. There are animals that do so, but human beings nowhere, except in Ireland. "There are nations of slaves, but they have, by long custom, been made unconscious of the yoke of slavery. This is not the case with the Irish, who have a strong feeling of liberty within them, and are fully sensible of the weight of the yoke they have to bear. They are intelligent enough to know the injustice done them by the distorted laws of their country; and while they are themselves enduring the extreme of poverty, they have frequently before them, in the manner of life of their English landlords, a spectacle of the most refined luxury that human ingenuity ever invented. "What awakens the most painful feelings in travelling through one of these rocky, boggy districts, rich in nothing but ruins, is this:-Whether you look back into the past, or forward to the future, no prospect more cheering presents itself. There is not the least trace left to show that the country has ever been better cultivated, or that a happier race ever dwelt in it. It seems as if wretchedness had prevailed there from time immemorial-as if rags had succeeded rags, bog had formed over bog, ruins had given birth to ruins, and beggars had begotten beggars, for a long series of centuries. Nor does the future present a more cheering view. Even for the poor Greeks under Turk ish domination, there was more hope than for the Irish under the English." Sad and dreary as is the picture drawn of the condition of poor Ireland by this eminent German traveller, he had seen it before the ravages of famine and pestilence had been experienced. What then must be the condition of its people now? An English traveller who passed through the south and west of the Island in 1842, four years before the exhaustion of the soil had produced disease among the potatoes, gave the following description: The traveller is haunted by the face of the popular starvation. It is not the exception-it is the condition of the people. In this fairest and richest of countries, men are suffering and starving by millions. There are thousands of them, at this minute, stretched in the sunshine at their cabin doors with no work, scarcely any food, no hope seemingly. Strong countrymen are lying in bed, for the hunger'-because a man lying on his back does not need so much food as a person a-foot. Many of them have torn up the unripe potatoes from their little gardens, and to exist now must look to winter, when they shall have to suffer starvation and cold too." Frightful as must have been the condition at that time, the cup of misery became full to overflowing, when an almost total failure of the potato crop took place, the consequences of which may be seen in the fact that the population numbered in 1850, 1,659,000 less than it did in 1840. Mr. Duffy, in a more recent article in the Dublin Nation, thus confirms all that has been said by the German and English travellers already quoted :— "No words printed in a newspaper or elsewhere will give any man who has not seen it a conception of the fallen condition of the West and the South. The famine and the landlords have actually created a new race in Ireland. I have seen on the streets of Galway, crowds of creatures more debased than the Yahoos of Swift-creatures having only a distant and hideous resemblance to human beings. Greyhaired old men, whose faces had hardened into a settled leer of mendicancy, simious and semi-human; and women filthier and more frightful than the harpies, who at the jingle of a coin on the pavement, swarmed in myriads from unseen places, struggling, screaming, shrieking for their prey, like some monstrous unclean animals. In Westport, the sight of a priest on the street gathered an entire pauper population, thick as a village market, swarming around him for relief. Beggar children, beggar adults, beggars in white hair; girls with faces gray and shrivelled, the grave stamped upon them in a decree which could not be recalled; women with the more touching and tragical aspect of lingering shame and self-respect not yet affected; and among these terrible realities, imposture shaking in pretended fits, to add the last touch of horrible grotesqueness to the picture! I have seen these accursed sights, and they are burned into my memory forever. Away from the town, other scenes of unimaginable horror disclose themselves. The traveller meets groups, and even troops, of wild, idle, lunatic-looking paupers wandering over the country, each with some tale of extermination to tell. If he penetrate into a cabin, and can distinguish objects among filth and darkness, of which an ordinary pig-sty affords but a faint image, he will probably discover from a dozen to twenty inmates in the hut-the ejected cottiers-clustering together, and breeding a pestilence. What kind of creatures men and women become, living in this dung-heap, what kind of children are reared here to go up into a generation, I have no words to paint." Speaking of the exodus of the people from the province of Connaught, the Western Star, deprecating the idea of the total expulsion of the Celtic race, nevertheless makes the following confession, showing with what eagerness Irishmen make their escape from Ireland to enjoy peace and plenty in the United States: "There is no doubt that in a few years more, if some stop is not put to the present outpouring of the people to America, and latterly to Australia, there will not be a million of the present race of inhabitants to be found within the compass of the four provinces. From the west," it is added, "they are flying in hundreds." "No thoughts of the land of their birth," it continues, "seem to enter their minds, although the Irish people have been proverbial for their attachment to their country. The prospect of an abundant harvest has not the slightest effect in giving pause to their outward movement. The predominant, and, in fact, the only feeling that seems to pervade them, is an indescribable anxiety to get out of the country at all hazards. If war, famine, and pestilence were known to be close at hand, there could not be greater avidity shown to fly from their houses than is every day exhibited by the hundreds who crowd our high roads and railways in their journey to the shipping ports." And this view of the subject is confirmed by a writer in the Edinburgh Review of July, 1854, in which he in a graphic manner describes the scenes attending their departure from the land of their nativity as follows: "When a number are about to leave, the whole village—the old (above sixty) against whose free immigration the passenger laws of some of the States interpose impediments; the well-to-do, who have no need to depart; the beggar, whose filthy shreds cannot be called a covering; the youngest children even,-gather in a tumultuous group about the car holding the smiling faces whose happy lot it is to leave forever their native land. With the wildest signs of grief for the departing, as if for the dead, with waving of hands, beating of the air, unearthly howls, tears, sobs, and hysterics, they press confusedly around the carriage, each one struggling for the last shake of the hand, the last kiss, the last glance, the last adieu. The only calm persons in this strange scene are the subjects of it all, to whom this moment is the consummation of long hopes and many dreams, who have talked of it and sang of it (for the songs of the peasantry now dwell upon it), till it has become a reality. Before going on board the ship at Liverpool they are subjected to a strict inspection by the medical authorities, and the same persons examine the medicine chests to see that the vessel is properly secured against maladies. They are then put on board the first vessel of the line sailing after their arrival; and we have the authority of Mr. Hale for saying, that they sometimes cross and land without knowing her name. When on board they are assigned to certain berths, their chests are hauled into the little compartments opening on the deck, in which their berths are situated; they are furnished with cooking places for the preparation of the stores which they take in addition to the ship's rations, the messes are made up for the voyage, the pilot takes the ship below the bar, search is made for stowaways, the pilot leaves, taking with him all secreted persons whom the search exposes, and the waters of the Irish Channel are breaking against the bows. There is even less sentiment in this parting than in the former; little of the regret so natural in leaving for the land of nativity. That comes later, when, in full employment, with plenty of money, a clean, comfortable room, a tidy wife, children at school, and the old folk and brothers and sisters brought out, Pat tells the Yankees what a jewel of a land he has left behind, and wishes (the rogue) that he may just lay his old bones once more there before he dies. There is no such feeling when the ship sails-not a wet eye, not a sigh, not a regret-all is buoyant hope and happiness." Of the Germans, the same writer speaks thus:— "They take leave of their country with a little more sentiment than the Irish, but yet without sorrow. The legends of forests which yield them no bread, and of mountains from whose vineyards no wine is pressed for their lips, the memories of the grass-grown streets and decayed fountains of Augsburg, the departed greatness of Nuremberg 'Quaint old town of toil and traffic, |