“Admitting, however, the national benefits of emigration, it remains a very important question, what are the individuals or classes to whom it affords advantages sufficient to compensate for leaving their native land; and what course they ought to follow in order to realize these benefits. This is a point on which the reader may reasonably expect us to throw some additional light; and we can in truth assert, that we have considered it as anxiously as if all our own prospects had been involved in its solution. To arrive at any fixed conclusion, however, has been by no means easy. The materials are ample, but they are furnished by individuals usually more or less prepossessed on one side, and in many instances incapable of expressing their ideas with precision, or even of forming any distinct or decided opinion on so perplexed a subject. We have endeavoured, however, by carefully collating opposite statements, by fixing upon ascertained facts and points in which all parties agree, to draw up for the intending emigrant a reasonable view of what he may expect to meet with in the settlements beyond the Atlantic. “The individuals who usually migrate into that new region may be divided into two classes,—those belonging to the labouring order, and those who seek to support themselves in the middling rank of society. The former go in the view of obtaining each a spot which he can cultivate with his own hands, subsisting chiefly on its produce: the latter hope, by the application of skill and capital, and by engaging the aid of others, to carry on operations on a larger scale, and to draw from their property a portion of the conveniences and even elegancies of life. The former comprise the more extensive, and indeed the more important branch of the subject; but as the latter will lead us to view it under a greater variety of lights, we shall most conveniently direct our first attention to it.