The question naturally occurs--How is it that, with all these natural advantages and encouragements to colonisation, and with its proximity to our shores, so very small a proportion--not more than one in sixty or seventy of the emigrants from Great Britain--make New Brunswick their destination? Professor Johnston, while he maintains that, taking population into account, New Brunswick is in this respect no worse off than Canada, adverts to several causes of a special nature which may have retarded its settlement. But the truth is, that the question above started leads us directly to another of far greater compass and importance--What is the reason that all our colonies taken together absorb so small a proportion of our emigrants compared with the United States? What is the nature of the inducements that annually impel so large a number of our countrymen to forfeit the character of British subjects, and prefer a domicile among those who are aliens in laws, interests, and system of government? We hardly know how to venture upon anything connected with the ominous subject of emigration, at a moment when the crowds leaving our shores, at the rate of nearly a thousand every day, are such as to startle the most apathetic observer, and shake the faith of the most dogmatic economist in the truth of his speculations. This is not the place to inquire what strangely compulsive cause it may be that has all at once swelled the ordinary stream of emigration into a headlong torrent.[6] Mayhap it is neither distant, nor doubtful, nor unforetold. But whatever it may be, there stands the fact--which we can neither undo, nor, for aught that can be seen at present, prevent its annual recurrence in future, or say how and when the waves are to be stayed. "When the Exe runs up the streets of Tiverton," says a certain noble prophet--whose vaticinations, however, have not been very felicitous hitherto--"then, and not till then, may we expect to see the reversal of the free-import system;" and then, and not till then, we take leave to add, may we hope to see the ebbing of that tide of British capital and British strength which is now flowing strongly and steadily into the bay of New York. [6] Total number of registered emigrants for the twenty-one years from 1825 to 1845 inclusive 1,349,476----Average, 64,260 Do. do. _for the five years_ 1846 _to_ 1850 inclusive, 1,216,557----Average, 243,311 PROPORTION OF BRITISH EMIGRATION TO THE COLONIES AND TO THE UNITED STATES, 1846-50 INCLUSIVE.