We have put the case in this strong form to show what will be done by change. Change in one thing necessarily involves change in another thing. We cannot change our habitations and our abodes, without also changing all in us which is peculiar to locality and the law of locality; and in this alone there is a large volume of life. That society is always the best which holds the closest together, and in which the work of adaptation and assimilation has been carried on the longest between its members. The superior frame of English society, which is the growth of an old community, and the sturdy world of the English people, will demonstrate this. There is a certain morality in locality, too, and the morality developed by a particular locality is always the healthiest for its people. We do not, however, mean to say that the morality of locality is sui generis—that it is something which is peculiar to particular localities independent of the people of those localities. This is an absurdity which we will not utter. But we merely mean to say that the morality of localities, or of the people of particular localities, is influenced, more or less, by the surrounding circumstances of locality. This remark will be strongly verified in the different social habits and moral sentiments of people whose occupation, from natural causes, differs; circumstances, for instance, of different situation, such as make some people nautical and seafaring, while others are agricultural and domestic. It is in this wise that locality may be said to have its morality, and that the peculiar phases of morality developed by the natural and unavoidable circumstances of situation are the best for the people of that locality. This is a proposition which we imagine no one will dispute. But there are very often carried into a particular locality certain phases of morality, or rather the want of it, which have no connection with the locality, and with which the genius of the locality has nothing to do. These are positive conditions of vice and immorality which may be engendered in any community.
Sensibilities are the most delicate and refined things conceivable. They are the result of the most delicate nurture of the feelings, the associations, and the relationships of life. The peculiar modes of association of a people—the peculiar frame and structure of their domestic relationships—has a great deal to do with the type and kind of their sensibilities. In a new country, where everything is rough, the sensibilities cannot be as nice and as refined as in an older community where they are nursed. Sensibilities, then, depend for their flexibility, and for the grain of their qualities, on the fineness—on the niceness—of the social food on which they have been fed. This is constantly being illustrated to us in the treatment of animals, even, which certainly have sensibilities of a certain kind.
Where the finer threads of society, then, are preserved, and where there are close-knit sympathies between the people, without too much of the rough work of a rough country to harden them and to dry up the fountains of the sensibilities, we may always there expect to find the flowers of love blooming in the greatest abundance. New countries, then, are not as favorable to the development of these feelings as older ones are, and the moral havoc in such countries is, usually, very great. But, apart from the rough circumstances of a new country, which have upon the feelings a hardening effect, the mental sensibilities are greatly influenced by scenery, and by the natural effect of air, temperature, etc. These refined elements are just as much a part of the mental food on which we feed as anything else is. All our ideas of comfort, of beauty, and of healthiness do not come from artificial surroundings and from the frame-work of society which we may have constructed. Mental emotions are excited in us by scenery; and that of the particular kind to which we have been used, though in reality it may, to some extent, be barren and bleak, is to us the most charming. The appearance of things in nature is indissolubly associated with our earlier lives, memories, incidents, occurrences, and sentiments; and so we, in the very nature of things, must love this earlier record better than any subsequent one which we may make. It necessarily follows that we love those peculiar features in nature the best which are the closest associated with our earlier experiences of life. The analyzing spirit will detect, at a slight glance, even the minute and particular differences between the outward features of different localities. The eye of the student of nature will at once perceive the smallest shades of difference in the leaves of trees of the same class in different localities. To the sensitive mind the rain, even, of different localities will have a different spirit, and its falling will make a different impression upon the mind. We are a wonderfully constructed battery, and the effect of these manifold things in nature upon the organism cannot be estimated, or correctly judged of, by any but those who, by living in new and strange countries, have had full experience of it. The chemistry of the soul is more marvellous than that of flesh and matter, and the effect of scenery, of air, of the spirit of the air, and of all the vast and grand combinations of matter on the brain, and on the life principles of man, cannot be judged of until, to him, some foreign country has written its strange history on his organism, and he discovers that, though in reality he is the same individual, still he does not see nature through the same eyes through which he was wont to see it, and does not feel its refreshing spirit as he was wont to feel it. These are some of the sad mental impressions made by great changes from one distant locality to another. Could anything be more hurtful or injurious to the human spirit? Could anything be more obliterative of morality, than not to respect and act out, every day of our lives, its sacred lessons in close connection with those old school associations with which we linked life the fondest, and through which we enjoyed it the dearest? The early dawn as it came to us shaded by the hills and the forests common to the localities in which we were born and reared; our parting with the great companion of the day, influenced by the same surroundings; the familiar notes of the night-birds common to our localities; the peculiarities of the very gusts of wind there; the peculiar haze of the atmosphere; the methods in which the very trees droop their branches; these, these are all familiar scenes and things to us all, and are, we may say, the school-house associates of our earlier lives, when our spirits were first learning the great lessons of life—those lessons under which life in us was organized and under which it has spread its richest and its grandest panorama. Change these localities and these scenes, and we feel as though we had parted with dear friends whose association is necessary to our lives, and for years afterward, they form, in our minds, an ever present picture of their appearance. These familiar scenes are the old oaken trees, so to speak, under whose umbrageous bowers we learned our first lessons of virtue and of life; and we cannot give them up, and part from them, without also surrendering some of the sacred lessons which, in their midst and in their hallowed shadow, we learned. But, throughout, the parting with home, and going into new localities, makes a new era in our lives. The village boy, who is the object of charity, and who has no ties to bind him but those of the guardian public, feels it. He even feels, when he parts with the dear scenes of his nativity, almost as though he had taken leave of the very God, whom he had been taught to worship, and that he lay launched out upon a great wide ocean of uncertainties, there to hunt for another God, and other friends. How must it, then, be with those who are a part of the household and the inheritance of human affections? Mother, father, brothers and sisters are gathered for the sad parting. Tears of deep grief fall thick and fast. There is, indeed, occasion for them. The heir of the possession, or the mate of fraternal friendship and love, is about to become a stranger. He is about to seek a home! (ah! sad word, in this connection,) it may be in the midst of olive-groves and of vineyards—away from the home of his inheritance, and the family are summoned to bemoan their loss. Years are to pass between him and them before they meet again, and when they do meet they are to each other strangers. This is indeed a sad picture. Can the growth and the building up of "a new country" compensate for it? I say not. I say that the planting of empire even, in the name and under the titles of the home government, it may be in some grandly tropical country, will not repay for these losses and for these sacrifices. Political grandeur is not the only object to be attained in this world. In fact, it is but an epitome of the grand and the beautiful objects of life. The comforts of home, and its solid connections, are worth more to us than all the offices in the world could be without them. And how few are there who nowadays appreciate and enjoy the comforts of home, even in their own natural communities, who are weighed down with the shackles and the plunder of office? How much more deplorable, then, the fate of the poor office-holder at a distance from his natural home, and those associates of his early life, found nowhere outside of home, which make life agreeable, and give to it its charms and its zest? His fate must indeed be pitiable and deplorable in the extreme. It is only, then, viewed generally, in the interests "of the public," (a most false "public interest,") that we heretofore have been enabled to find so much heroism in the spirit of venture and of distant emigration that the almost entire press of the country have lauded it, and have praised it "as a spirit of public enterprise;" which praise has done much toward exciting in the people of the world that restlessness and feverish spirit of excitement, which has led so many men and families to leave their natural attachments, and to seek location either in foreign and distant countries, or in States, at least, remote from those in which they were reared. These removals have always, when viewed in a moral and social light, been more productive of harm to the parties concerned than of good. Avoid them, in the future, would be our earnest advice to all good people. The best and greatest men of the world have invariably staid at home.
But are not the boundaries of civilization to be extended, may be asked? Most assuredly they are; but only slowly and by degrees, like waves as they spread and enlarge from a centre of disturbed waters. This is, undoubtedly, the true method of enlarging the area of settlement and of "civilization."
The parties immediately concerned are not alone the parties injured by distant removals. They affect, more or less, the world at large. The bad morals, engendered by innumerable people leaving their homes, where the sediments of society have settled to the bottom, and repairing to new and remote localities where there is no strongly constructed web of society, are not confined alone to the localities where the social connections are loose; but they spread like some terrible plague, and seize upon the minds of people of the denser and older communities. A reciprocal interchange in morals is finally established between these remote and unlike communities, until the tone of the one is measurably improved, while that of the other is gradually reduced, and made worse by the interchange than it was before. These are some of the damaging effects of "new settlements," at a distance from the older ones. The law perfected is to be found only in the close and tight connections of society, with all of the social interests well defined, and with social rights so clear that one person will not interfere with those of another. This degree of social security and comfort is the perfection of the law; and no civilized government has any interest in upholding a system of "settlement" and of colonization which impairs the strength of the social structure.
Society has been built under the guardianship of the church, and any system either of "settlement," or of politics, which threatens the integrity of society, is against the interests of government, and equally against the interests of the Christian religion. Government is the secular means which we employ to enforce those wholesome moral inspirations of the church which have constructed society on sure foundations. Anything which attacks this wholesome system is at war with the Christian religion, and, consequently, against the higher civilization of the age. The sacred affinities and congenialities of home should not be disturbed, and society debauched, by a mania amongst the people for separations and removals. "Those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder," applies also to the firm welding together of those whose lots he has made similar by nature, as it does to that holy matrimonial alliance by which a man takes to himself a consort and a mate, and by which a woman takes to herself a husband. That government is not truly and reliably built on the foundations of the Christian religion which disregards any of these sound maxims of social life, and which makes provision for scattering those members of society who are the most natural to each other, and which holds out to them the very strongest inducements to scatter and to form new associations. Such is certainly not a healthy law of society, and is in direct contravention of the great natural order. We must pay attention, in this as in all other things, to the associations made by nature. It is a monstrosity to suppose that there is not power enough in nature to adapt those to each other who were born together. It is a faith in this sort of power which associates people together in family groups, and which upholds the vast system of paternal and fraternal relations established throughout the world. If it were not for the belief in the perfect natural adaptation to each other of persons born of the same parents, we would not have so strong a system for rearing them together, and for imposing upon those who are responsible for their being so large a duty to keep them together whilst taking care of them. Nature, it is true, would suggest this duty, but society has strengthened it. It is the perfect fitness, naturalness, and adaptation of beings for each other, who were born together, which makes the family system strong, and which imposes upon parents the moral duty of keeping their offspring together while they take care of them; by which means the beautiful and sacred relations of brother and sister are established in something more than in the mere name. But we will not discuss a proposition which is so plain. It is not necessary for us to do it. The main feature which, in this connection, it is the most necessary for us to notice, is the necessity for some system by which violent separations between members of the same community and family may be avoided, and by which society may be strengthened in its foundations. For, if these separations tend, as they most assuredly do, to the weakening of the family ties, it is necessary for us to take some strong measures in order to bind families more closely together; or else, the whole system of society, through these very means of neglect, will ultimately be disorganized, and will go to pieces. Indeed, we are rather verging on such a condition in this country now. We have what we call homes, it is true; but we now have really very little of the true family system. Nearly one half of the time of the younger members of the family—if not more—is not now spent, in the great majority of cases, under the paternal roof; and there is now in American society a perfect mania for being anywhere else except at home, and there may be said to be no family law. This is certainly a most deplorable state of things, and if pushed to further extremes, will ultimately disorganize society altogether. Whenever that may be done, government will then be impossible. So it behooves the public men of this country to look about for some remedy for this most distressing evil. Where can it be found? is the important inquiry of to-day. Our opinion is, that emigration, the restless spirit of movement, which our system of legislation has developed, is the fruitful source of the evil, and consequently, to correct it, we must change our migratory habits and policy. We have organized too many "territories," and have encouraged the building of too many railroads in far distant and remote regions from the centres of settlement, thereby causing our people to emigrate and to move about from one place to another. We have not sufficiently encouraged stability in the people. We have pursued a course of legislation which has made them restless, speculative, and venturesome. In this way we have not developed the real wealth which we might have developed had our people staid at home, and preserved their even, temperate avocations. But the material injury done by this system of removals has not been the principal evil of it by any means. Society has been unhinged by it. The strong attachments of home have been violently rent asunder, and by that means, our people have been compelled to look for their amusements, their enjoyments, and their entertainments, more in public than in private. This has had upon their dispositions, their habits, and their morals a most unbalancing effect, until now very little indeed is held by them to be any longer secured. These are the gigantic evils of the day with which we now have to battle, and the important question of the hour is, How are they to be met?
The question is much more easily asked than answered. A huge evil is upon us, however, and we must devise ways of ridding ourselves of it. Indeed, we do but develop the strength of the human, by devising means for the overthrow—the complete overthrow—of all of our evil conditions. No condition, then, however bad, may be supposed to be too gigantic for our efforts. Let us but keep steadily in view the great and important aims of life, and we certainly can make all else succumb to them. In working out the great problem of life, we must expect often to have to go back, and work it over again. We must often undo much of the work which we may suppose ourselves to have done, and must do it over again, in order to avoid errors and to correct mistakes. It may be a hard task for us to perform; but nevertheless, we must do it. We know that there is a common error that in national affairs God is at the helm, and that we cannot steer wrong; that everything that has been done in the national "destiny" has been rightly done, and that God is certainly with us there in every step that we may take. This is certainly a most fatal error. God is no more with us in our national course than he is in our individual business, and in this we very often find it necessary to retrace our steps, and to correct errors. If we were to accept every individual misfortune, and every individual piece of bad management, as the direct work of God, and should make no effort to correct it, our private fortunes would be in a most deplorable condition. Without, then, being irreverent, we must recognize God in ourselves, in our national as well as in our individual matters, and must understand that good results are invariably the offspring of good motives and of good efforts, and that bad results are invariably the offspring of bad motives and bad efforts. We must understand this, and we must make results the guide and the criterion of divine will and divine favor. If results are good, we must suppose that God favors them; if they are bad, we must suppose that he disapproves them; and, as we honor him, we must set about correcting them. This, in my judgment, is the true criterion by which to judge of the divine will and the divine favor. Under this rule, then, we are at liberty, and we are expected to scrutinize every act of national conduct, and to see whether or not it is full of the seeds of good results; and if we find that it is not, then, at whatever cost to us the thing may have been done, to expunge it, and correct the error. This is sound national wisdom, as it would be sound individual wisdom. We have, then, already, too many railroads extending into far, remote regions of our country, distant from the centres of settlement, inviting our people to leave their homes and their families, and to emigrate in quest of fortune and of new honors. These invitations by our government are like so many snares set by the tempter to tempt us into sin and wickedness. I would say that all of the sacred interests of society would dictate to us the policy of abandoning the building of these roads, and equally to abandon the policy of organizing "new territories," to thereby tempt our people to hunt for new fields of "settlement." Let us make that strong which we already have. Let us refine and civilize as we go, and let us make but slow haste in extending the boundaries of our "settlements." This would seem, to our mind, to be the suggestion of wisdom. We must not conclude, either, that because money has been spent, and labor has been performed, that therefore we may not abandon altogether huge enterprises of "settlement" which have already been begun, and that our people now in remote "settlements" may not, in a great measure, return to their former homes. Such a course, undertaken on a large scale, might be productive of the best results, and perhaps, in the course of time, would be. But we must not anticipate too much. We must reach this proposition by degrees. We must, in a matter so grave as this, be, as in the process of settlement, slow. We must not proceed with it too fast.
The degrees of civilization are remote from each other. Indeed, government would be of but little use if it were not productive of the best results, where it is applied in the best spirit and under the soundest administration. We cannot, from the very nature of the circumstances, expect these results for it in distant and remote regions from the centres of settlement, where the population is sparse, and where, on account of the formidable difficulties of a new country and new fields of labor, there is but little time on the part of the people to devote to social improvements. These are difficulties, certainly, to be considered, in estimating the scale of civilization of a people. We naturally look for a much healthier tone in an old community than we do in a new one. In an old community there is a much larger surface from which to choose an occupation, and the various interests of society are much better connected than they are in the new communities. These are important things to be considered by the adventurer after a home—if so paradoxical a thing is to be allowed as that a home may be found by adventure! In fact, the thing is impossible. Adventure can never make a home. A home is the product of continuing possession, and of careful culture. It is not necessarily a particular house, or a particular piece of land, which has been in the same hands for generations, which makes a home. But it is a continuous abiding of the same family and its members for several generations in the same neighborhood, the same locality, which makes, in the fullest sense, a home. They are then a part—incorporated as such by nature—of the community and of the locality in which they may chance to dwell. It is this, more than the continuous possession of a particular house or a particular piece of ground, which makes home. The woods, the streams, the outer walls of nature to which people have been accustomed, must have been the same, or similar and kindred ones, for at least several generations, in order to make for them a home. Where this has been the case, there nature is fully incorporated in those beings. There is not, then, in their own peculiar locality, a leaf, or a tree, or a flower, or a bird, that is not fully understood, and interiorly possessed by them. Through the manifold processes of nature, they, in this time, have made acquaintance with things in nature, and have become a much stronger part of the creation. Any traveller will tell us that, when he first begins to wander, things in nature at a distance from home appear strange to him, and that he never does become as well acquainted with them as he is with those corresponding things which he has left behind, that have been not only his, but also the familiar associates of his parents before him. This, we will venture to say, will be the testimony of all travellers. There is, in this testimony, a great lesson to be learned by us. It is the lesson that, if we want to be a part—absolutely a part—of creation, so as to have immediately under our control, at all times, a commanding sense and consciousness of our power in nature, and over it, as a part of it, we must stay where our organisms command the elements the best, and where, by long residence, they have become the strong masters of things in nature. This is certainly no new philosophy. If it has not been fully heretofore eliminated as a philosophy, in this form, it certainly has in other forms, just as substantial and far more practical. What are our feelings connected with our return to the earth but a confirmation of this doctrine? Every man who has a soul in him loves his own native soil; and when the solemn hour of dissolution approaches, he feels, as one of the last of his earthly hopes, that he would like to be gathered to the graves of his fathers, in the land of his and of their wanderings. This is an event which is capable of testing the matter, and of proving the attractions which our earliest homes have for our spirits. When all nature is dissolving in us, we naturally look for support to those localities where life was organized in us, and which have fortified us the strongest with those forces on which we must rely the most to ward off dissolution. Thus our minds and our affections are naturally carried back to the land of our birth, in a way to make us love it above all other spots of earth, and in a way to cause us to desire it as our last resting-place. If these last trials do not show to the human spirit—drawing upon all of its resources for support—where its chief strength in nature lies, whether in the new home, or the old one, then perhaps our theory that we lose many of the essential elements of life by migrating, and by going to a great distance from the home of our nativity, may not, indeed, be a sound one. But we must take the case of the normal spirit to prove it. The moods of the spirit that has been debauched and made common; that has lost the love of its sanctuaries by dishonorable and aimless wanderings, are not a fair test of our philosophy. We must take some spirit who has gone into a distant land seeking fortune, with the love of home in his heart, and with the responsibilities of family upon him; and let the trial of dissolution come upon him, even after years of absence, and see if his last thoughts are not directed to the home of his childhood, and if the last appeals which he makes in his mind to nature to save him are not addressed to the genius, the localities, the scenes, the cherished associations, of his earlier home. This must be so. It is unavoidable. The cool stream from which we drank in our boyhood thirst often has power, when vividly called to mind, to abate the rage of some terrible fever; and the maternal hand, as we see it in imagination laid upon us, long years, even, after that hand has been stilled, has power to soothe us. Thus fancy makes medicine from the past, and the chosen spots of the spirit's earlier wanderings are the places to which she goes for her healing arts.
The maternal breast has attractions for us as long as we live. Its sorrows are our sorrows, and it is upon the same principle and by the same laws of correspondence that we love our earlier homes the best, and that they have over our morals a stronger control and a more salutary influence than any other society or community can have. In fact, a removal from our own community and our own home is too often looked upon as a license to do as we please, and is interpreted as a relaxing of the social traces in which we had been bound. It is not worth while, at present, to explore the philosophy of this fact, but it is a fact, and we therefore deal with it accordingly. We know that the white man is the representative of civilization, and that he carries with him a Christian inheritance wherever he goes. We know that in any situation in which he may be placed, he will strive to ally himself with his God. We know that he has fixed the cross of his worship upon many a bleak mountain of this land, and that he has planted the vineyard of peace in the remote regions of the wilderness. We know that he has established government, erected schools, built churches, and planted the seeds of society in far and distant regions from the centres of civilization. We know all this, and yet we know, or believe, that if this same potent mass of human beings, thus scattered and toiling separate and apart from each other, had held together under the strong covenants of a powerful society, and had advanced in a body to occupy and possess the land, holding together at every step, the rainbow of God's favor would have spanned over them in such luminous light that we of this continent would now have been a strong and powerful and united people, in the enjoyment of a civilization and in the possession of a purity of social life neither enjoyed nor possessed by any other people on the earth.