Canada and the Canadians | Page 6

of Roman Catholic men are ever ready to advance the standard of their faith; whilst Mexico, weak as it is, offers another Catholic barrier to exclusive tenets of liberty, both of conscience and of person.
It is surprising how very easily the emigrants are misled, and how simply they fancy that, once on the shores of the New World, Fortune must smile upon them.
There is a British society, as I have already stated, for mutual protection, established at New York; and the government have agents of the first respectability at Quebec, at Montreal, and at Kingston. But the poorer classes, as well as those whose knowledge of life has been limited, are sadly defrauded and deluded.
At a recent meeting of the Welsh Society at New York, facts were stated, showing the depravity and audacity of the crimps at Liverpool and New York. The President of the Society said that, owing to the nefarious practices against emigrants, the Germans first, then the Irish, after that the Welsh, and lastly the English residents of the city had taken the matter in hand by the formation of Protective Societies.
The president of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick observed that in Liverpool the poor emigrants were fleeced without mercy; and he gave as one instance a fact that, by the representations of a packet agent, a large number of emigrants were induced to embark on board a packet without the necessary supply of provisions, being assured that for their passage-money they would be supplied by the captain--an arrangement of which the captain was wholly ignorant.
The president of the Welsh Society exhibited sixty dollars of trash in bills of the Globe Bank, that had been palmed off upon an unsuspecting Welshman by some rascal in Liverpool, in exchange for his hoarded gold, and declared that this was only one of a series of like villanies constantly occurring.
The ex-president of the St. George's Society, Mr. Fowler, mentioned a curious circumstance connected with the history of New York. He said that he remembered the city when it contained only fifty thousand inhabitants, and not one paved side walk, excepting in Dock Street. Now it had a population of nearly 400,000, and had so changed, that he could no longer identify the localities of his youthful days.
Who, he asked, had done this? The emigrant! and it was protection they needed, not charity. He should have added, that the great mass of the emigrants who have made New York the mighty city it now is, were Irish, and that the native Americans have banded themselves in another form of protection against their increasing influence.
The republican notions which the greater portion of the lower classes emigrating from the old country have been drilled into, lead them to believe that in the United States all men are equal, and that thus they have a splendid vault to make from poverty to wealth, an easy spring from a state of dependency to one of vast importance and consideration. The simple axiom of republicanism, that a ploughman is as good as a president, or a quarryman as an emperor, is taken firm hold of in any other sense than the right one. What sensible man ever doubted that we were all created in the same mould, and after the same image; but is there a well educated sane mind in America, believing that a perfect equality in all things, in goods and chattels, in agrarian rights and in education, is, or ever will be, practicable in this naughty world?
Has nature formed all men with the same capacities, and can they be so exactly educated that all shall be equally fit to govern?
The converse is true. Nature makes genius, and not genius nature. How rarely she yields a Shakespeare!--There has been but one Homer, one Virgil, since the creation. There was never a second Moses, nor have Solomon's wisdom and glory ever again been attainable.
Look at the rulers of the earth, from the patriarchs to the present day, how few have been pre-eminent! Even in the earliest periods, when the age of man reached to ten times its present span, the wonderful sacred writ records Tubal-Cain, the first artificer, and Jubal, the lyrist, as most extraordinary men; and with what care are Aholiab and Bezabel, cunning in all sorts of craft, and Hiram, the artificer of Tyre, recorded! Hiram, the king, great as he undoubtedly was, was secondary in Solomon's eyes to the widow's son.
These men, says the holy record, were gifted expressly for their peculiar mission; and so are all men, to whom the Inscrutable has been pleased to assign extraordinary talent.
C?sar, the conqueror, Napoleon, his imitator, and Nelson, and Wellington, are they on a par with the rabble of New York? Procul, O, procul este profani!
Pure democracy is an utter and unattainable impossibility;