Travels through the states of North America, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797 [Vol. 1 of 2]Weld, Isaac
History
Travels through the states of North America, and the provinces of Upper and Lower Canada, during the years 1795, 1796, and 1797 [Vol. 1 of 2]
Weld, Isaac
Canada -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800; United States -- Description and travel -- Early works to 1800
The Germans, as I have said, are fond of settling near each other: when
the young men of a family are grown up, they generally endeavour to get
a piece of land in the neighbourhood of their relations, and by their
industry soon make it valuable; the American, on the contrary, is of a
roving disposition, and wholly regardless of the ties of consanguinity;
he takes his wife with him, goes to a distant part of the country, and
buries himself in the woods, hundreds of miles distant from the rest of
his family, never perhaps to see them again. In the back parts of the
country you always meet numbers of men prowling about to try and buy
cheap land; having found what they like, they immediately remove; nor
having once removed, are these people satisfied; restless and
discontented with what they possess, they are for ever changing. It is
scarcely possible in any part of the continent to find a man, amongst
the middling and lower classes of Americans, who has not changed his
farm and his residence many different times. Thus it is, that though
there are not more than four millions of people in the United States,
yet they are scattered from the confines of Canada to the farthest
extremity of Georgia, and from the Atlantic to the banks of the
Mississippi. Thousands of acres of waste land are annually taken up in
unhealthy and unfruitful parts of the country, notwithstanding that the
best settled and healthy parts of the middle states would maintain five
times the number of inhabitants that they do at present. The American,
however, does not change about from place to place in this manner merely
to gratify a wandering disposition; in every change he hopes to make
money. By the desire of making money, both the Germans and Americans of
every class and description are actuated in all their movements;
self-interest is always uppermost in their thoughts; it is the idol
which they worship, and at its shrine thousands and thousands would be
found, in all parts of the country, ready to make a sacrifice of every
noble and generous sentiment that can adorn the human mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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