When what may be called the blockade of Europe was raised by the final defeat of Napoleon, immigrants began to pour into the United States in large numbers. Many of them, like many immigrants to-day, became stranded in the cities of the coast, without resources and without employment, willing to work, but unable to get work. In February, 1817, James Buchanan, the British consul at New York, issued a warning against immigration to the United States, on the ground, as he alleged, of numerous applications made to his office for aid to return to Great Britain and Ireland, but at the same time the consul stated that he was authorized to place all desirable immigrants, who found themselves destitute in New York, in Upper Canada or Nova Scotia. Mr. Buchanan was evidently not so anxious to assist his fellow-subjects of King George as he was to promote the British policy of building up the Canadian territories as a counterpoise to the United States. While there was undoubtedly some distress among immigrants of the improvident class, those who came here with the determination to work generally found work before long at much better compensation than they could have earned in England, while those who proceeded to the new regions of the West had no difficulty in becoming independent and prosperous freeholders. "In exchanging the condition of an English farmer for that of an American proprietor," wrote an intelligent immigrant, "I expect to suffer many inconveniences; but I am willing to make a great sacrifice of present ease, were it merely for the sake of obtaining in the decline of life, an exemption from that wearisome solicitude about pecuniary affairs from which even the affluent find no refuge in England; and, for my children, a career of enterprise and wholesome family connections in a society whose institutions are favorable to virtue; and at last the consolation of leaving them efficient members of a flourishing, public-spirited, energetic community; where the insolence of wealth and the servility of pauperism, between which in England there is scarcely an interval remaining, are alike unknown. * * * It has struck me as we have passed along from one poor hut to another, among the rude inhabitants of this infant State, that travelers in general who judge by comparison, are not qualified to form a fair estimate of these lonely settlers. Let a stranger make his tour through England in a course remote from the great roads, and going to no inns, take such, entertainment only as he might find in the cottage of laborers, he would have as much cause to complain of the rudeness of the people, and more of their drunkenness and profligacy than in these backwoods: although in England the poor are a part of society whose institutions are matured by the experience of two thousand years. But in their manners and morals, but especially in their knowledge and proud independence of mind, they exhibit a contrast so