no disposition to help themselves. The railroad companies and the emigration societies also give the emigrant from six to eleven years to pay for their land, but the price is high, and the interest at from seven to ten per cent. adds materially to the price, while the first payment comes hard on a man who has little or no money, and his title is not complete till he has paid for the land, while a default in payment works a forfeiture of his farm, and the loss of most of what he has paid. Meanwhile, if he has no money, how is he and how is his family, if he has one, to be fed before he can raise a crop, or earn money for immediate support? Neither the emigration society nor the railroad company can or will support him. He would have done better to have gone to work for any one who would give him his board and even moderate wages, and if he could secure a farm under the Homestead or Timber-Culture Act, he would at least have no heavy debt to weigh him down, and no ground of anxiety about his own food and raiment.

No industrious, willing, able-bodied man need starve if he reaches the West alone, with but a dollar in his pocket, but he will not accumulate property so rapidly as if he had a little to start with. John Jacob Astor, the founder of the Astor family, once said, that the only difficulty he had in accumulating his vast estate was in earning the first thousand dollars.

We have purposely presented the dark side of the picture to emigrants, because they need to know the worst as well as the best. The rosy and pleasant side is presented to them every day, and they are tempted to believe that there are no shadows till they come into the actual experience of them, and then they find them so dark and gloomy that they are ready to recoil from them, and say, "If we had only known, we would not have come."

But the emigrant who goes to the West with small means should know beforehand that there are awaiting him and his family, if he has one, exposures to severe cold and intense heat; hard beds, perhaps of pine or spruce boughs, or dried leaves. on the ground; scanty food at times, with hunger for his only sauce; poor cooking, from the want of proper utensils; clothing

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which he would have disdained at his old home; a lack of all the conveniences of life; very possibly at first no schools, no church, no post-office within twenty or thirty miles; a house of one or two rooms built of sods or of logs, with a floor of earth, and upon this humble house, perhaps the summer's sun beats fiercely, and the winter's snows may bury it out of sight. But he should know also that these privations and discomforts will be but temporary; that in, perhaps, four or five years, he will have a pleasant home and farm, with all the comforts of life, and all his own; that school and church, and town-hall and postoffice, with perhaps a daily mail, will all have come by that time; that good clothing and the luxuries of choice beds, excellent and toothsome fare, and the music of organ or piano, may gratify his tastes; and knowing these things, he should decide whether the privations of the first few years were worth enduring, for the sake of the comforts and substantial benefits which will probably follow.

There is another view of this subject of emigration to which attention should be directed. For some years past great efforts have been made to direct emigration to other countries than the United States; the Dominion of Canada, Australia, Brazil, Buenos Ayres, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Chili, have sought to attract emigrants to their respective countries. The Dominion. and Australia have been moderately successful, for the whole influence of the British Government has been exerted, properly enough, in their favor; but, the emigrants to Canada have had much greater hardships to undergo than those to our western country, and very nearly two-thirds of them have eventually crossed the border and located themselves under the Stars and Stripes.* The Australian emigrants have struggled manfully with the trying climate, and the very great hardships which they have had to encounter, but many of them have come into the

* Lately there is much complaint among the emigrants to Manitoba, that by recent Acts of the Colonial Legislature, they cannot secure lands within five miles of the proposed railway to the Pacific coast for less than six dollars per acre, and all homesteading is cut off from that belt, and, further, that by the Act of July last, the homestead grant, however distant from market, is limited to eighty acres, while the United States Government make it 160 acres.

West by way of San Francisco, and the tide of emigration to the United States to-day is more than four times that to Australia, The emigration to the South American States has in most cases proved a complete failure. Liberal as were the offers of the governments, the whole matter was badly organized and managed, and the sufferings of the emigrants became so intolerable that they were glad to escape to their old homes with the loss of everything, being indebted in many cases to the consuls of their respective countries for a free passage homewards. The present rapid influx of emigrants from Europe to the United States, and their strenuous objections to going to any other country, shows conclusively that the experience of sixty years of emigration has convinced the people of Europe that the will fare best here.

CHAPTER II.

'THE ROUTES BY WHICH OUR WESTERN EMPIRE IS REACHED THE NORTHEASTERN REGION THE CENTRAL REGION-THE SOUTHERN-THE SOUTHWESTERN— THE PACIFIC STATES AND TERRITORIES.

THE immigrant who has valiantly resisted at Hamburg, Bremen, Rotterdam, or Havre, at Southampton, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, or Cardiff, the blandishments of the emigration companies, and the glowing representations of the railway companies, and who lands at Castle Garden, New York, unpledged to any company, and under no obligation to take a poor route when there is a better to be had, may well rejoice in his freedom; but he will find himself beset by as hungry a horde of runners and canvassers for all the different routes, as ever drove a poor man to distraction.

If he has made up his mind to what section of the West he will migrate (and he should have done this before leaving home), our advice to him would be to stop over a day at Castle Garden and make choice of the route which will bring him most directly, quickly, and safely to his desired destination. He cannot well do this from the flaming posters placarded there; nor from the

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noisy vociferations of the runners; and there is a strong possibility that even some of the officials may have been slightly influenced by interested persons to give the preference to one route or another from motives not altogether disinterested.

Knowing where he wishes to go, and knowing also, as he may, what railway lines will take him thither most surely, directly, with the greatest amount of comfort, and the smallest amount of cost. he can make up his own mind as to his route as well as anybody else can do it for him, and, as all the routes have their real eastern termini at Castle Garden, he can. purchase his tickets there and have no further trouble, except occasionally looking out for his meals and his baggage, till he reaches his destination, or the railway terminus nearest to it.

The journey on an emigrant train will be at the best a long and weary one, but if he has a fellow-countryman or shipmate of his own way of thinking, and bound for the same vicinity as himself, the companionship will relieve the journey of some of its tedium for both.

If our immigrant is a farmer, or farm-hand, and desires to establish himself in Iowa, Minnesota, Dakota, Northeastern Montana, or Nebraska, he will probably find it desirable to make Chicago his point of departure for the Northwest. Chicago is distant from New York about 950 miles, the five trunk roads running thither varying from 933 to 975 miles in the length of their lines to it. There is very little room for choice between the Hudson River and New York Central, the Erie, the Pennsylvania Central, and the Baltimore and Ohio roads, all of which run trains through to Chicago. They are all good roads, and give the immigrant as nearly the worth of his money as they can possibly afford. These lines, we believe, now all make close connection with the Chicago and Northwestern lines, which are the connecting lines with the Northern Pacific, and the Minnesota, Iowa, and Dakota Railways. By taking a through ticket, via the Chicago and Northwestern, to any point reached by this railway or its connections. he will be insured a passage with as few annoyances as he will find on any route. One precaution

he should not fail to take. The number and class of his railway

ticket, and the railroads over which he is to pass, and the numbers and stamps of his baggage checks, should all be noted down in a little memorandum, and he will do well occasionally to see that all his baggage is on board. In case of loss of either baggage or ticket, he will recover damages much more readily if he can tell on which of the affiliated roads it was lost and what were the numbers. He should also have a printed time-table of the roads over which he passes, which will be furnished him for the asking at the office of the railroad on which he is to travel, in Castle Garden. It seems a pity to be obliged to caution a man against his fellow-man, especially when he is a stranger in a strange land; but it is necessary to say, once for all, not only to emigrants from Europe, but to our own people who may be migrating westward, that it is best to be shy of strangers, unless they are introduced to you by those whom you have reason to confide in as honest and trustworthy, and even then it is not necessary or wise to become too confidential with them, to tell them all your family history, to show your money to them, or inform them just the amount you carry about you. It is very imprudent and foolish to engage in any games of chance or skill with strangers, especially in any involving the winning or losing money. If you win, your antagonist has probably lost what he can ill afford to lose; if you lose, as you probably will (for generally, it is only sharpers who propose to play in a public conveyance), you will feel the loss and have occasion at the same time to lament your folly. Never manifest a suspicious disposition in regard to those who are about you. If there is anything you cannot understand, ask the conductor, courteously and pleasantly, and he will generally be courteous in his reply. Do not make yourself conspicuous by loud talking, or a swaggering manner. There are always people on the train who will weigh a man at what he is really worth, not at the value he may set upon himself. Do not judge of people by their dress or their pretensions. You will often find in the West, a millionaire in plain, rough clothing, or an eminent scholar in a dress which might be worn by a tramp; while a gambler, black-leg, or horse-thief may sport his diamonds, or dress in irreproachable taste.