invoked by a nation whose increasing numbers press hard, not against their capital, but against the productive capacity of their land: I mean Emigration, especially in the form of Colonization. Of this remedy the efficacy as far as it goes is real, since it consists in seeking elsewhere those unoccupied tracts of fertile land which, if they existed at home, would enable the demand of an increasing [pg 152] population to be met without any falling off in the productiveness of labor. Accordingly, when the region to be colonized is near at hand, and the habits and tastes of the people sufficiently migratory, this remedy is completely effectual. The migration from the older parts of the American Confederation to the new Territories, which is to all intents and purposes colonization, is what enables population to go on unchecked throughout the Union without having yet diminished the return to industry, or increased the difficulty of earning a subsistence.
There is no probability that even under the most enlightened arrangements (in older countries) a permanent stream of emigration could be kept up, sufficient to take off, as in America, all that portion of the annual increase (when proceeding at its greatest rapidity) which, being in excess of the progress made during the same short period in the arts of life, tends to render living more difficult for every averagely situated individual in the community. And, unless this can be done, emigration can not, even in an economical point of view, dispense with the necessity of checks to population.
The influence of immigration to the United States from European countries, in lessening the tension in the relation between food and numbers, is one of the most marked events in this century. The United States has received about one fourth of its total population in 1880