The second comes also to marry, and hopes his father won't treat him
worse than he treated his brother. He accordingly gets four acres more,
and settles down as his brother did. In this manner the holding is
frittered away and subdivided among them. For the first few years--that
is, before their children rise--they may struggle tolerably well; but,
at the expiration of twenty or twenty-five years, each brother finds
himself with such a family as his little strip of land cannot adequately
support, setting aside the claims of the landlord altogether; for rent
in these cases is almost out of the question.
What, then, is the consequence? Why, that here is to be found a
population of paupers squatted upon patches of land quite incapable of
their support; and in seasons of famine and sickness, especially in a
country where labor is below its value, and employment inadequate to the
demand that is for it, this same population becomes a helpless burthen
upon it--a miserable addition to the mass of poverty and destitution
under which it groans.
Such is the history of one class of emigrants in this unhappy land,
of ours; and what small farmer, with such a destiny as that we have
detailed staring him and his in the face, would not strain every nerve
that he might fly to any country--rather than remain to encounter the
frightful state of suffering which awaits him in this.
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