“Who moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
Who plants his footsteps on the sea,
And rides upon the storm.”
Wearily over the wilderness of waters would they journey onwards. Like birds with ruffled plumage, that feel themselves strangers when they have alighted upon a new land, the wild waste beside the ocean-shore where they landed would at first be trod with an aching heart; there would not be one old familiar object to comfort them. The Indian who carries the bones of his relatives to the far forest which he is driven into, and there erects a new hut, leaves scarcely an object of regret behind, for his hopes are anchored upon his great hunting-ground beyond the grave. One who soars into higher and purer realms in the dreams of an hereafter, is chained to earth by greater regrets. The very tree in the centre of the village-green wears a new charm when seen through the “mind’s eye” from a far distance, and the humblest objects become more endeared to us when they are no longer within our grasp. Brighter and broader landscapes may burst upon the view in a new world beyond the ocean; but never shall we again find those familiar features in the scene which we have left behind: oft
“ ... in the stilly night,
When slumber’s chain hath bound us,
Fond memory brings the light
Of other days around us.”
A far different scene met our eyes not long ago in the East India Docks, when the Canterbury Association sent out their emigrants to New Zealand. What we then witnessed compelled us to take another view of emigration, and to regret that many of our poor needlewomen were not numbered among the comfortable-looking Canterbury colonists.
The scene seemed to carry us back to bygone years, when the Pilgrim Fathers went forth over perilous seas (linked together by one faith) to establish colonies in far-off lands, and build cities in wild wooded wastes which had before borne no imprint but that of beasts of the chase, or the footmark the Indian hunter left behind while pursuing them. Stern men, such as Cromwell selected his Ironsides from, and staid matrons who, during the civil war, laid aside their psalters to load arquebusses, were the unflinching elements out of which our colonies were formed in those stormy old times. Neither gaols nor workhouses were emptied to people these early settlements, but firm, high-souled men and women went out, accompanied by their ministers and grave elders—such as in more ancient days assembled in our Saxon witenagemotes—full of moral resolves, and gave them laws, and established another England, in which they could worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. They weeded not the garden to transplant its sickly and seedy roots, but (so to speak) took out the very seed and the purest mould, and formed for themselves strong and healthy beds, that produced such fruit as tempted and attracted others to sally forth and cultivate their newly-discovered fields.
Of similar materials to these is the Canterbury Settlement, in New Zealand, to be formed, and more than a million acres to be peopled, by those who are of one faith—members of the English Church—and who are to begin by building schools and erecting places of worship, and thus providing for the intellectual and spiritual wants of the community. Food and raiment and shelter are not all they undertake to supply, but ample provision is to be made for much higher and holier purposes.
None who are really poor and wretched accompany them; such as go out, as servants and labourers, are men and women of good character, and members of the English Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury is at the head of the association, which numbers amongst its members noblemen and gentlemen, and those connected with the Church; in short, we shall not err by calling it a religious community. Hunger, and crime, and sin, and sorrow, and nakedness, and wretchedness they leave behind. Except the working emigrants who accompany them, we believe that nearly the whole of the settlers are large purchasers of land: some few of those who have speculated remaining here. They are also at liberty to establish their own form of government—to be, in fact, free and independent of England. It will be seen that they set out with such wealth, respectability, and numbers, as surpass all that our former colonists ever possessed, but that they take away none of our unemployed and needy poor.
What we witnessed on board the vessel in the East India Docks awakened no painful feelings, for they were not people actually compelled to leave their country because they were unable to obtain a living in it, like the many thousands who covet but the common necessaries of life, and cannot obtain them. We turned from the well-spread tables then before us, and thought of the poverty and wretchedness of those who drag out a miserable existence in our over-crowded London streets; the thousands who stand
“Houseless near a thousand homes,
And near a thousand tables pine for want of food;”
who bring no old memories into the crowded city, in which many of them were born. Home, with all its green boughs rustling above the rippling stream—the murmur of the bee—the shout of the cuckoo, and the mellow song of the golden-billed blackbird, were never to them old familiar sounds; they have nothing to sigh over, to look back upon and regret. The word “Home” to many of them has no charm, has never been surrounded with comfort; it is but a shifting from attic to attic, or from cellar to cellar; it but conjures up unhealthy back-rooms and high dead-walls, and breathless courts, which, when the wind reaches, it only stirs the sleeping poison, and scatters wider the stench of a thousand stagnant sewers. There they sit, in such neighbourhoods as Whitechapel and Bethnal-green, and hear of holidays and merry seasons, in which they have no share. The Christmas bells but ring out to them telling that nights are long and coals dear; and they are compelled to sit and listen to those sounds in the darkness, or by the glimmering of a handful of fire, for they are too poor to purchase even a candle. Spring processions and Whitsun holidays but tell them that there are pleasant places somewhere, which people are rushing out of town to see, though for them the flowers grow not, nor have they ever rested under the cooling shadow of a green tree. All they know of time is by feeling hungry, and struggling against sleep, while “stitch, stiching” for such establishments as Mr. Mayhew has described in his London Labour and London Poor, keeping no other record of the hours but by the number of stitches they take, or how long it will be before they can afford to eat again, while hunger is gnawing within, though the insufficient meal is but just concluded. Their homes were places from which they were many a time turned out because they could not pay the rent, then left to stand shivering and starving in the street, until some one, who numbered as many miseries as they, all but the want of a wretched roof for a covering, invited them in—and they sat crouching beside the fireless grate, thankful that, in addition to hunger, they had not to endure