MR. COURTNEY ON "THE SWARMING OF MEN."
WE commented last week, rather too briefly perhaps, upon the singular position taken up by the philanthropists of the day, the men given to " tenderness " and agrarian laws, in relation to emigration. From the most " advanced " thinkers among them, down, or up, to the Free Church ministers of Ross shire, they are all opposed to it, all discourage it, and all denounce those who think it a natural method of relief for a congested population. Believing emigration to be in certain districts an absolute necessity, we tried to point out the fallacy of their arguments ; but we might as well have spared the effort. A stronger champion was already in the field. Mr. L. Courtney, the Chairman of Committees, had already sent his paper on the subject to the Nineteenth Century ; and to those who read it, further argument on emigration will seem a regrettable waste of time. The trained statist and logician does not argue with the philanthropists, or smile at them, or interest himself in any way about them. He only puts together the facts, which show their opposition and their support to be equally unimportant. They might as well pass resolutions against the precession of the Equinoxes. Throughout Europe, and specially in the United Kingdom, a force is at work which operates as strongly and uniformly as any natural law, and induces men, whenever they find themselves pressed either by being too thick upon the ground, or by want of the means of livelihood, to move them- selves away, either to places within their own country where work
is more plentiful, or to places beyond sea. "An examination of true centres of life leads us inevitably to connect the shifting of points of maximum increase with the development of some industry, the discovery of some local springs of activity, a new appreciation of previously unrecognised facilities for the appli- cation of more efficient processes of labour. Some change makes it possible for more life to be sustained at a given spot, or to be more favourably sustained than elsewhere, and imme- diately more life appears there. In one decade the hosiery district of Leicester leads the van ; in another the maximum growth may shift to the homes of the cotton industry; in
another the black country is foremost ; or, again, the ship- ping ports, the colliery centres, the fields of rich iron deposits compete with one another as points about which there is the most rapid accumulation of human life." This migration goes on upon so vast a scale, that nearly the whole increase of the population of England and Wales, which has been so enormous within this century, has migrated into the towns. " Whilst, however, London has grown so enor- mously in population and in so great a proportion compared with the rest of the Kingdom, its rate of increase has not been at all commensurate with that of many provincial towns, nor has it been equal to that of the towns of England as a whole. Speaking of these towns as a whole, it seems a fair estimate to say that of the nine millions living in England and Wales in 1801, three millions lived in towns. This errs, if at all, in making the town population too large a proportion of the whole. Of the twenty-six millions of 1881, nearly fifteen and a half millions lived in towns ; or, if we follow the Registrar-General in ranking as townsmen all who live in urban sanitary districts, more than seventeen and a half millions were townsmen. The inhabitants of towns have increased at least fivefold ; the inhabitants of the country at the most by 75 per cent. The town population was one-third of the whole ; the Registrar-General's calculation would make it two-thirds." This migration is not confined to England. " In Norway," the land par excellence of peasant-proprietors, "the town population was 9 per cent. in 1801; this had grown to 181 per cent. in 1875, and it is now 22 per cent. In the United States," where land can be had for the asking, "the proportion was only 3.9 per cent. of the whole in 1800; it was 22.5 per cent. in 1880." In presence of facts like these, what is the use of demonstrating on paper that overpressed men ought to migrate, be it from Lewis or elsewhere ? They do emigrate when- ever they are let alone, in overwhelming numbers, and always towards the points—as, for example, the whole county of Lancashire—where the prospects of steady work are most abundant. Their instinct is as unerring as that of the Australian rabbits, who never move towards the desert. They think nothing either of labour questions, or land questions, or the necessity of keeping up voting power ; they do not feel " humiliated," and they do not ask for " more sympathetic " treatment ; but they take up their tools and move steadily on, as if driven by the internal and irresistible impulse which compels birds to cross the ocean, or Russians of the Northern provinces to flow downwards in a never-ceasing stream towards the sunnier South. Wiser than their would-be teachers, they obey the natural law which impels air to fill a vacuum, and by their end- less march they secure the prosperity of the country. They do not shun even Ireland, it being one of the unintelligible facts of that unintelligible land, that while Irishmen are rushing away, and the population has sunk to 4,853,000, the influx of English- men and Scotchmen is increasing. Mr. Courtney says :— " There are now three times as many English and Scotch, and more than four times as many foreigners, in Ireland as there were in 1841."
We have dwelt upon this migrathin because it is so vast ; but it is only one of two movements always going on, and which are produced by the same impulse. Crowds only less great than those which invade the towns pour from every country of Europe across the sea. Millions of men have within this genera- tion left our shores for those of the United States, the Canadian Dominion, and Australia ; and the movement is going on still. The United Kingdom, in fact, sent out between 1872 and 1886 one hundred armies of 30,000 souls each, and the greater number of these, more than half the whole, were from England and Wales :—" In the fifteen years 1872-86, some 3,000,000 natives left our shores, and although nearly 1,000,000 came back in the same period, there was a net outward movement of 2,000,000. But out of the 3,000,000 that went, something like
1,760,000 were English, more than 300,000 Scotch, and 930,000 Irishmen. The proportion of the last to the population at home was the greatest of the three, but the other migrating armies are significant. Lastly, of the 3,000,000, more than three-fifths went to the United States, about one-ninth to Canada, and less than a fifth to the Australian Colonies." This rush of life from Europe is not confined to these islands, is not even greatest in them. It seems, for instance, occasionally as if all Norway were departing. In 1880-83, nearly 100,000 persons went away from that little land of 2,000,000, and population was not only arrested, but declined. Sweden, with only 4,500,000, sent away in 1880-84 nearly 165,000 emigrants ; and we have received in- formation that in 1885 the tide rose even higher. Germany is flinging her sons in fleet-loads into America, the rate increasing, apparently, with every decade, so that between 1880-85—only six years-924,000 Germans had gone forth, in addition to two millions more who had departed between 1851 and 1870. Even in Italy, where Northerners imagine less energy to exist, the outflow never ceases. The Italians have chosen the Argentine Republic as their future home ; they have sent thither, since their emancipation, nearly three-quarters of a million, and while 77,000 left in 1885, the outflow for the first half of 1887 exceeded 50,000. Mr. Courtney does not speak of the great Austrian emigration, which, it is said, even affects politics, the emigrants remitting money in support of every Liberal movement; and he says nothing of the steady sweep of Russians to the South, which the Government of St. Petersburg is trying vainly to arrest, and which will in the end depopulate the whole region north of a line drawn from St. Petersburg to Asia. There is, however, no need. Not Ireland, but Europe is contracting the habit of emigration, and the question which perplexes philanthropists is rapidly solving itself. Between 1841 and 1880, little more than one generation, less than the time which has elapsed since our Queen's marriage, nine millions of European foreigners have arrived in the United States to settle for ever in the land. The instinct of movement has conquered mankind almost as completely as it did just before the Christian era, when the emigration of the white races of Asia first became perceptible to the world. We know little accurately of that movement, its motives, its extent, or its guiding forces; but we know that it re-made the future of the world. It is probable that some change occurred in Central Asia which made sustenance difficult, and sent the tribes slowly marching in search of bread away to their Far West. The pressure was renewed again and again, and the tribes wandered on ceaselessly till they reached the Atlantic, and could wander no farther ; so that when the next addition to their numbers came, they turned south, and after a war which lasted centuries, submerged the Roman world. Earth owes its Christian theology to one emigration, and all its modern progress to another ; and then we are told that emigration is a "rude and barbarous expedient," suggested by the rich in order to be rid of trouble !—trouble which is far greater in Prance, where the population does not increase, and where, therefore, emigration is an almost unknown resource.
But might not emigration become too great Possibly,
though it is more probable that the moment a country is -depleted down to the point at which it can find comfortable subsistence for its children, the stream will cease to flow. There is, however, we acknowledge, much evidence to show that emi- gration is regulated not so much by positive need at home, as by the attractiveness of the foreign country usually selected for -a new life. The ratio of emigration varies, for example, in England and Norway not so much in correspondence with the work procurable here, as with the rate of wages ruling in the United States. It is conceivable, therefore, that even a prosperous land might be partially emptied by the attractions - of an El Dorado. This actually happened in a few districts of Australia after the discovery of gold, many prosperous settle- ments being depopulated in the rush to the diggings ; and it may have happened once in the history of a great country. The subject is surrounded with difficulties, but we think it pro- bable that the great decline of Spain from the time of the Armada almost to the time of Isabella was due, in part at least, to the rush of Spaniards to the New World. Spain was neither poor nor famine-stricken, but the El Dorado across the Atlantic drew her people as a magnet draws steel-filings. All that was energetic and adventurous in Spain sought the New World, there to gain estates or fortunes, or at all events an ideal life, and Spain steadily declined. That danger is, however, a remote one. Iceland, and even Norway, may be depopulated, and Ireland will be reduced to three millions ; but in most countries emigration does little more than keep the numbers of the babies within the limits at which they do not quite overwhelm the means of subsistence. From that rush across the oceans the world gains enormously, and our especial race in still greater propor- tion ; while there is no evidence that Europe as a whole loses, or is even threatened with loss. On the contrary, she is relieved a little—not much, but still a little—of her gravest source of apprehension,—the fear that after her long career of progress, her civilisation, with all its gains, mental, moral, and material, may for the second time be lost under the rise of a deluge of barbarism from below. That argument, however, signifies nothing. A peasant in Egypt may be pleased that the Nile overflows ; but the Nile overflows without any wish to produce his pleasure ; and the swarming of men is as irresistible—we may add, as fertilising—as the overflow of the Nile.
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