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grant is required to pay under the pretext or demand of "hospital money." This charge, which is levied on steerage passengers, is doubled in the case of cabin passengers. By reference to the official returns, noticed in a preceding part of this chapter, the reader will perceive that 56,578 emigrants landed in the year to which it refers, at the port of New York, contributing a sum little short of one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, at the minimum amount charged, for the support and maintenance, hospital charges, &c. of every chance applicant from amongst them for relief. This sum, which may be considered far under the average of other years, is paid in the above proportion, and in this instance by the emigrant as a part of his passage money, and exacted from him before that he is permitted to go on board.

Assuming the ascertained risk at thirty-three per cent, or a sum of about forty-one thousand dollars, there will remain under this modified calculation a surplus sum or revenue of eighty-four thousand dollars that annually finds its way into the city coffers-contributed by these " pauper emigrants," as they are called, and it is probable, appropriated to pay the salaries of many of the public corporate officers and retainers of this body, who very possibly owe their situations to the virulence of their opposition, and the unsparing, and uncalled-for abuse with which they assail the emigrant, especially of the old country, on every occasion that is presented to them.

Doubts have frequently arisen as to the constitu

tionality of enforcing these exactions, apart from every other consideration:-the positive right of any individual State of the republic to enact and enforce laws, delegating a discretionary power of this kind, so liable to be abused, and that in its practice might be made to operate as a direct and positive interdict of all communication between the seaboard, and other inland portions of the United States, and the free subjects of other nations, in peace and amity with its government. It certainly appears to our thinking, an arrogant assumption of legislative power, on the part of any segment or separate portion of the confederacy—a right that we contend belongs only, and under its responsibility, to the nation at large-a direct and hostile interference with the interests and acknowledged privileges of other States, of which it thus assumes to be the arbiter; whilst we conceive it to be opposed in its first principles to the spirit, if not the precise letter of the American constitution, such as we have read it, requiring only to be properly and legally tested before the federal tribunals of the country, to be denounced in terms of unqualified condemnation.

We will not blend with this question the right that every State has to frame laws for its own internal, or municipal government. These are beyond even the claim or just right of remonstrance; and belong to the people to whom the maintenance and protection of their own rights, so long as they do not infringe on the established rights of others, is in every way conceded. But the

laws of which the emigrant complains, in this instance, are not limited to this extent. They reach, in their more positive control, above the mere domestic government of this, or any other State of the republic, and may be extended ad libitum to operate as a positive interdict of all intercourse between the people of other, and European countries, and those of the several States of the New World, beyond the western limit of New York.

By the 9th section, article 1st, of the Federal Constitution, a power is vested in the General Congress, solely to control emigration to the United States, by the imposition of a tax at their discretion, not to exceed ten dollars each person; but no such authority, we opine, is directly given to any of the individual States, who are bound under the 2nd section, 3rd article, of the same Constitution, to submit in all matters of controversy "between two or more States, between a State and citizens of another State, and between a State and citizens thereof, and foreign States, citizens, and subjects," to the jurisdiction of the Federal Government, to be determined by the laws in force under the Constitution.

Had a severe and onerous tax of this kind been confined to those emigrants who intended to continue residents of the State of New York, there might perhaps be some colour of excuse for the demand; but there can be no apology for the exaction, when borne in mind, how very few of European emigrants, who annually arrive in this port, remain within the city, or continue subject to its municipal authority, but immediately find their way to the newly settled

western country, and are thus far removed from every remote chance of becoming a burden, either on the bounty, or taxes, of its goodly citizens.

A two-fold question arises from these demands: the one as immediately relates to the emigrant; the other, with reference to the generally admitted rights of neighbouring inland States, who are to a considerable extent affected by the imposition. The first, involving the constitutional privileges of any one of the Federal States to interpose by local or municipal laws, and of its mere will in checking emigration to the United States; or of interfering with the assumed rights, that are at least impliedly and mutually conceded by friendly States, to the citizens or subjects of each respectively, of landing on their soil, and of peaceably sojourning or passing through the territory of the other, to any other terminus, or to where perchance their objects, or interests, may eventually betake them. The second,-the constitutionality of any such interference, by, or on the part of any one State of the Republic, to the admitted prejudice of remote and newly settled States, interposing between the manifest interest of such State, and the influx of an emigrant population into its territory. These are matters, though scarcely within our province, of which we hope to see an early and amicable adjustment; at present they operate as a grievous imposition, a severe hardship on the emigrant stranger, in the pecuniary and unreasonable exactions they compel him to undergo.

Should the emigrant hope to profit by the advantages that are, nevertheless, offered to him in

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the change he has made of country, and of home, he will find it necessary to remodel himself with more becoming care, to the practice, and national peculiarities of the people he is amongst, than to which he has generally been accustomed; to abandon, or at least to modify, many of his peculiar notions, and to identify himself more in spirit, as in his conduct, with the habits, and national feeling, than the generality of those of his countrymen who have preceded him, have deemed it of importance to attend to. By this means only will he avoid the jealousies, the vexed and angry feelings that are every day springing up against him in the country; the antipathies, and deep dislike, which these feelings necessarily produce, and that have so fearfully of late displayed themselves in overt acts of lawless violence and crime, that surmise is defeated in anticipating their further result, or the injurious consequences that may arise from the determined hostility which a repetition of these scenes are so likely to occasion.

Twice within the present year has Philadelphia, the second of American cities, become a prey to the wild disorders of an unrestrained licentiousness; originating in the party strifes, for such has been their character, of the "Native American Party," including amongst them the reckless and discontented outpourings of American society within its limit, and the Catholic or Irish emigrant population of that devoted city; against whom the tide of popular fury was for several successive days directed.