labour in America, combined with other causes, induced Parliament, in 1854, to appoint another Committee of the House of Commons, besides the one which sat in 1851, to inquire into this now important subject, and to pass an Act, in the following year which is the chief Act now in force (18 & 19 Vict. c. 119) exclusively directed to the conveyance of passengers by sea, more especially of that class of persons known as emigrants.
Between 1815 and 1854, inclusive, 4,116,958 passengers left the United Kingdom, being upon an average 102,923 persons annually. But of this vast number 2,446,802, or nearly three-fifths, emigrated during the eight years previous to 1854, and 1,358,096 of them in the previous four years. So great had the rage for emigration become, that in 1854, no less a sum than 1,730,000l. was remitted by settlers in North America to their relations and friends in the United Kingdom for the express purpose of enabling those who had been left at home to join them in their adopted country.[1]
Yet these acts of generosity and self-denial, altogether unparalleled in the history of the world (we have no record of any such acts in the great tides of emigration from the East, and in those which peopled Carthage from Phœnicia), had been performed during many previous years, the sums remitted for this purpose having varied from about half a million sterling to more than a million and a half annually. This rush for emigration having induced Shipowners,
- ↑ See 'Fifteenth Report of Emigration Commissioners,' 1855, p. 1, and 'Sixteenth Report,' 1856, p. 329.
