Mere good living was the chief inducement for the labourer type of emigrant, and the knowledge of such living created for this type remaining in England a sort of halo of industrial prosperity surrounding America.  But there was a second testimony brought out by Horton’s Committee, less general, yet to be picked up here and there as evidence of another argument for emigration to America.  The labourer did not dilate upon political equality, nor boast of a share in government, indeed generally had no such share, but he did boast to his fellows at home of the social equality, though not thus expressing it, which was all about him.  He was a common farm hand, yet he “sat down to meals” with his employer and family, and worked in the fields side by side with his “master.”  This, too, was an astounding difference to the mind of the British labourer.  Probably for him it created a clearer, if not altogether universal and true picture of the meaning of American democracy than would have volumes of writing upon political institutions.  Gradually there was established in the lower orders of British society a visualization of America as a haven of physical well-being and personal social happiness.

This British labouring class had for long, however, no medium of expression in print.  Here existed, then, an unexpressed public opinion of America, of much latent influence, but for the moment largely negligible as affecting other classes or the Government.  A more important emigrating class in its influence on opinion at home, though not a large class, was composed about equally of small farmers and small merchants facing ruin in the agricultural and trading crises that followed the end of the European war.  The British travellers’ books from 1810 to 1820 are generally written by men of this class, or by agents sent out from co-operative groups planning emigration.  Generally they were discontented with political conditions at home, commonly opposed to a petrified social order, and attracted to the United States by its lure of prosperity and content.  The books are, in brief, a superior type of emigrant guide for a superior type of emigrant, examining and emphasizing industrial opportunity.

Almost universally, however, they sound the note of superior political institutions and conditions.  One wrote “A republican finds here A Republic, and the only Republic on the face of the earth that ever deserved the name:  where all are under the protection of equal laws; of laws made by Themselves[11].”  Another, who established an English colony in the Western States of Illinois, wrote of England that he objected to “being ruled and taxed by people who had no more right to rule and tax us than consisted in the power to do it.”  And of his adopted country he concludes:  “I love the Government; and thus a novel sensation is excited; it is like the development of a new faculty.  I am become a patriot in my old age[12].”  Still another detailed the points of his content, “I am here,