Casimir Maremma
By , Author of “ Friends in Council ” and “Realmah.” Boston: Roberts Brothers,
HAD not Miss Martineau’s “ Illustrations of Political Economy ” been discontinued some thirty years ago, this might pass for one of the series. The moral is emigration, which it was the hero’s mission to organize and inaugurate. The author here gets him as far as matrimony and embarkation, and the next volume is to give his experiences in the colony. We are not to have him among us in these parts, though, for he is going among “ intelligent Indians.”
This may mean Boston, however, for Mr. Helps is not strong on American affairs ; he thinks it would be much better if this Union were divided into three or four large States (p. 6l), and he complains that for want of organized emigration “ the great towns of the New World have nearly the same amount of squalidity, unhealthiness, and abject misery ” as those of the Old (p. 383). He probably bases his whole comparison on New York; yet as New York has but 15,000 paupers out of a million inhabitants, while London has 150,000 out of three million, even this extreme case shows a rather hasty style of generalization. For the rest the story can be read, which “ Realmah” could not (at least by this present witness), and is not more tiresome than most of the genteeler class of English novels. For his scheme of organized emigration, it is much like a hundred other schemes that we have seen rise and fall in America, and does not inspire any great interest. It is infinitely pathetic, however, to think of a nation where the prime object of statesmanship is to send the people out of the country ; and where the interest of the experiment is so great, that families have to be “ evicted ” by hundreds to take part in it, their houses being pulled down over their heads to make “ organized emigration ” look more attractive.