Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/478

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

employment will at any time attract emigrants. The less successful members of the professions naturally look to new emigration fields. Just fifty years ago a young engineer who was crowded out of his profession had resolved to settle in New Zealand, but, receiving a small apppointment, stayed on in England to become the most eminent philosopher of his age. An ex-Lord Chancellor relates that he and another briefless barrister, the present Speaker of the House of Commons, were at one time on the point of emigrating to "the colonies." Some have their career prepared for them before they start: bishops, professors, certain officials and experts generally, the flower of a nation's culture and of late growth, are regularly exported from England to her colonies, and even to the United States.

2. Human beings are less free to travel than swallows or lemmings, and they can temper a northern winter by warmer clothing, shelter, and fire. But even so there are many English families and still more individuals who regularly or occasionally hibernate in the Riviera, Algiers, and Egypt. Others expatriate themselves for a time or for life. The Brownings made a home in Florence till the lady's death, and Aristophanic Frere endured lifelong banishment in sunbaked Malta. It is usually to warmer latitudes that migrants move who are "ordered south," but Symonds found health in the snowclad solitudes of the Engadine. Those who emigrate from such motives are more remarkable for quality than number. The statesmanlike organizer of a New Zealand province was a consumptive. Consumption sent Richard Proctor to observe the "larger constellations burning" in the "happy skies" of Florida, and thither also bilingual Edmund Montgomery; to Queensland it dispatched Clement Wragge to found Australasian meteorology. The literary worker whose strength has given way rejoices to have escaped from the fogs and darkness, the cold and wet of a London winter, and feels his sense of well-being heightened in the light air and unfailing sunshine of New South Wales. Not invalids only, but almost all, gain by southing. The Sutherlandizing of the north and west of Scotland excited indignation, and the inflamed imagination of the sentimentalist saw "the heather on fire"; but the Highland crofter who barters his miserable patch in the rainy Hebrides for a farm in Natal or Otago makes a blessed exchange. Whole peoples move southward with the slow, resistless motion of the glacier. The pine tree longs for the palm tree, in Heine's song, and the Russian advance toward Constantinople is doubtless accelerated by the snow and ice of the declivity.

3. Ambition is an old motive for emigration. The Andræemon or Androclus who led a Greek colony to the shores of Asia Minor intended to remain as its tyrannus; and so have most of the leaders