Alexandria Gazette & Daily Advertiser

ALEXANDRIA:
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1818.

THE FORCE OF LOCAL ATTACHMENT.

The criticism on Birkbeck's notes on a journey in America, in the Edinburgh Review of June last, contains a passage on the subject of Emigration, so deeply founded in the philosophy of the human heart that we have selected it for the perusal of our readers, with the most perfect conviction that the far greater part of them will agree with us, that in doing it we dispose of so much of our columns to greater advantage than we should do if we appropriated it to a discussion of any point of that wearisome, worn-out, disgusting, humdrum subject, politics.--The reviewer speaks in the true spirit of that kind of patriotism which binds men down to their country by an early imbibed love of the spot on which they were born and reared, or, in other words, local attachment, which he considers as an insuperable bar to emigration from Europe to the new world on the very extensive scale which many speculators seem disposed to anticipate: and of which Switzerland has presented such extraordinary proofs that it has been called the Swiss malady--many of that people having languished under it to death itself, even when the change they grieved at, was the superior climate and comforts of France itself.

"This" (says the reviewer, after quoting a strong and vivid description of the advantages attending a removal to this country)-- "this is unquestionably one of the most tempting points of view in which emigration has ever been represented to men of moderate fortunes and industrious habits. Yet we are not of the number of those who view with alarm the probable consequences of such a temptation being held out. After all, says Dr. Smith, man is, of all luggage, the most difficult to be transported.--In truth, he takes such root wherever he has been planted, that long after almost all nourishment has been extracted from it, we find him cling to its bare rocks, and rather wither than be torn away. It is in vain to remind him how bleak the sky, how scanty the nutriment, how exposed to tempests the position. We find him rebuilding his cottage upon the half-cooled lava which has swept all his possessions away, and obstinately refusing to quit a spot of earth which the perpetual conflict of the elements hardly leave at rest for a day. Not even the pestilential swamps of Guiana and Java can frighten him from his home, and dissolve the most powerful of all ties--local attachment. In vain we remind him of his privations, his sufferings, his risks. He knows it all; he feels it to be a dear price; but his home he deems above all price, and he willingly pays it. In vain we paint to his imagination the delights of happier climates, and the rich abundance of more luxurious soils. He admits it all: but in those lands he feels that he would ever be a stranger, and against all those enjoyments he sets one word--home. Even when he leaves it for a season, he fondly dwells upon its pleasures, now magnified in his imagination, while the friendly treachery of his memory sinks every unpleasant reality, which fancy had failed to varnish over with fairy colours.--And in the midst of distant pursuits, which leave hardly a possibility that his connexion with the sacred spot should ever be other than nominal, he refuses to give it up, be it but a name; and his heart loudly protests against any final step that may dispel that which he knows, all the while, to be a wretched illusion of the brain. If providence had not, by so powerful an instinct, set its canon against emigration, all the laws of man could never have tied the bulk of any community to a country where they are doomed to pine in want--while ease and comfort are within their reach, and to be purchased by the single act of changing their place of abode. Nay with the vast majority of mankind, those feelings, which the rudest climate and meanest lot cannot subdue, are too strong even for the rudest hand of the government and its agents--what shape soever they may assume--whether of inquisitors, or spies, or mercenary troops, or collectors of taxes.

"It thus happens, that unless in circumstances the most extraordinary, the number of emigrants from any community must always bear a small proportion to the whole population."