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HERE is an unofficial agency constantly at work in promoting or retarding im magration, which it would be very unwise to overlook in any general scheme for the promotion of this great national interest, and which should prompt us to remember that the work is scarcely half done, when we have provided the most ample and complete system of information bureaux in the countries whence immigrants may be expected. This unofficial agency is in the hands of immigrants themselves, and is not the less effective because it works silently and secretly. The letter from the friend in America is conned not only in the old homestead, by the English fireside, but it passes from hand to hand until all the village has read it; and it becomes the leading subject of conversation at the social gatherings for weeks after its arrival. Against its statements those of official pamphlets or official lecturers can make small headway; and unfortunately the natural tendency to exaggeration on the part of such agents, makes it all the more difficult on their part to combat the assertions of actual experience on the part of the immigrant himself. During the last three years the British weekly press has contained many letters from emigrant settlers in Canada. They have influenced to a considerable extent the direction of emigration; and unfortunately, as it is more easy to appeal to the fears than to the hopes of people, the letters which breathed a spirit of disappointment were invariably the most influential. I have known such letters, or extracts from them, cut out by agents interested in emigration to the United States, and sent to the provincial press throughout the kingdom. They are always, or almost always, inserted;

while it is not so easy to procure the publication of letters written in a spirit of congrat ulation at the fact of the writer having emigrated, of contentment with the present, and of hope for the future. The disconsolate letters are almost always written within a few days or at most a few weeks of the arrival of the emigrant. The tedium of the ocean voyage; the intense heart-longing for the old faces, lost apparently for ever, and for the old haunts now memories of the past; the landing at the miserable quay at Point Levi, as forbidding a spot as ever a poor stranger faced in a strange land; the tedious and novel ride by rail, in cars not always as comfortable as they should be, to the western destination; the strangeness and newness of everything; the delay in obtaining employment, and the fact that it was perhaps not that which had been expected; the first full realization of the truth that the new world like the old is, after all, but a work-a-day world, subject, like other places, to the curse -was it not rather a blessing?—which fell upon our first parents, "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread;" and the revulsion of feeling when the castles in the air which he had been building vanished into dim distance-all these prompted him to write home to warn his friends against facing the disappointments which had come upon him. It is these letters, written under such impulses, that are the most difficult stumbling-blocks in the way of a conscientious agent. And one of the problems to be solved is, how they can be rendered less frequent, and less justifiable.

The solution of this problem must be found on this, not on the other side of the Atlantic. The very complaints contained in those

letters, silent emissaries of mischief to the cause of immigration, suggests the method of that solution. It consists in a kindly provision for the reception of the emigrant on his arrival in the country, and such a system of labour registration as would enable the agents of the Government not to lose sight of him until he was in actual employment of some kind. Since the former article was written, the Government of Ontario have asked the Legislature for a larger appropriation for the promotion of immigration than has ever been voted before by any Legislature in Canada; and have foreshadowed the policy which they propose to adopt in the expenditure of this liberal appropriation. It would be unfair to criticise this policy for two reasons: first because it is put forward avowedly as an experiment, and as such it should be accepted; and

second because the short time which the administration has been in office, and the circumstances under which they accepted it, during the session, justified their asking to be entrusted with the expenditure of this money as the experience and information of the season may seem to them best. It is to be feared, however, that they have not sufficiently considered the influence of this unofficial agency in the policy which they have foreshadowed. A liberal expenditure upon agencies at leading centres within the Province, and upon a system of internal transit for emigrants, would secure to the cause of emigration to Ontario the active co-operation of the emigrants settling in it. That co-operation is worth more, far more, than any system of agency in Great Britain, in view of the fact that already the agencies abroad have been amply, and on the whole ably, filled by the Dominion Government. It is worth more than any result that will flow from a system of subsidized immigration; and it can be secured at very much less cost. Such centres of population as Brockville, Belleville, Peterborough, Guelph

and London, whence emigrants could be distributed to the surrounding districts, should be supplied with agents; the same policy being pursued in each of the other Provinces. These local agents should be charged with the duty of obtaining full information as to the labour wants of their respective districts, thus enabling them to do the double good of securing employment for the immigrant and labour for the employer. They should be in constant communication with the Dominion agencies at the larger centres, so that on the arrival of immigrants these latter would know where to send them; and in this way they would be made to feel that they were at least welcome, and that the government and people were doing their best to tide over for them the first days of terrible lonesomeness and helplessness.

In order that this plan may be carried out successfully, that the unofficial agent may be prompted to work for, instead of against, emigration to the Dominion, it is essential that there should, as far as possible, be public works in progress at all times. It is true that the ordinary system of labour registration will always do much towards securing employment to the newly arrived emigrant, and under all circumstances it is of the very first importance that it should be kept up as an active and constant agency. Its importance is admirably illustrated in a pamphlet just issued by Mr. F. P. Mackelcan, of Montreal. He points out, what is at once a patent and a painful fact to all who feel an interest in the prosperity of Canada, that while fields have remained uncultivated and workshops partially idle for want of labour, emigrants who could have tilled the fields and laboured in the workshops, have passed through the country into a foreign land under the impression that there was no employment for them here. "The chief subject of anxiety that presses upon the new comers," the writer of this pam