nd was adequately rewarded with a medal. For in emigration the
young men enter direct and by the ship-load on their heritage of work;
empty continents swarm, as at the bo's'un's whistle, with industrious
hands, and whole new empires are domesticated to the service of man.

This is the closet picture, and is found, on trial, to consist mostly of
embellishments. The more I saw of my fellow passengers, the less I was
tempted to the lyric note. Comparatively few of the men were below
thirty; many were married, and encumbered with families; not a few were
already up in years; and this itself was out of tune with my
imaginations, for the ideal emigrant should certainly be young. Again, I
thought he should offer to the eye some bold type of humanity, with
bluff or hawk-like features, and the stamp of an eager and pushing
disposition. Now those around me were for the most part quiet, orderly,
obedient citizens, family men broken by adversity, elderly youths who
had failed to place themselves in life, and people who had seen better
days. Mildness was the prevailing character; mild mirth and mild
endurance. In a word, I was not taking part in an impetuous and
conquering sally, such as swept over Mexico or Siberia, but found
myself, like Marmion, "in the lost battle, borne down by the flying."

Labouring mankind had in the last years, and throughout Great Britain,
sustained a prolonged and crushing series of defeats. I had heard
vaguely of these reverses; of whole streets of houses standing deserted
by the Tyne, the cellar-doors broken and removed for firewood; of
homeless men loitering at the street-corners of Glasgow with their
chests beside them; of closed factories, useless strikes, and starving
girls. But I had never taken them home to me or represented these
distresses livingly to my imagination. A turn of the market may be a
calamity as disastrous as the French retreat from Moscow; but it hardly
lends itself to lively treatment, and makes a trifling figure in the
morning papers. We may struggle as we please, we are not born
economists. The individual is more affecting than the mass. It is by
the scenic accidents, and the appeal to the carnal eye, that for the
most part we grasp the significance of tragedies. Thus it was only now,
when I found myself involved in the rout, that I began to appreciate how
sharp had been the battle. We were a company of the rejected; the
drunken, the incompetent, the weak, the prodigal, all who