CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF THE ENGLISH SETTLEMENT By RICHARD FLOWER. - WITH A LETTER FROM M. BIRKBECK; AND A PREFACE Thou shalt bless the LORD thy God for the GOOD LAND which he hath Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour. London: DIVINE COMMANDS, PRINTED FOR JAMES RIDGWAY, PICCADILLY 1822. [Price Two Shillings and Sixpence.] 1 PUBLISHED BY THE SAME AUTHOR, LETTERS from Lexington and the ILLINOIS, 1819; containing a Brief Account of the English Settlement in the latter territory, and a Refutation of the misrepresentations of Mr. Cobbett. : PREFACE. Two of the following letters have before appeared in a respectable periodical publication, in which the editor has impartially inserted the communications of writers of different opinions, on the subject of emigration;* but as they may be said to be a continuation of former letters, and connected with those now for the first time published, I have thought proper to insert them. Readers who are desirous of forming just opinions on this subject, are requested to bear in remembrance the precise stations described in the following pages. However unworthy or base may have been the motives of certain writers, who have grossly calumniated the English Settlement, there are others, * Monthly Repository, Aug. and October, 1820. to whom it would be uncandid to impute such motives, but who are chargeable with misrepresentation, which appears to have arisen from their not having considered that the spots they are describing are not those described by others; and that, of course, it is not fair to charge others with statements they have never made. I have publications before me in which Mr. Birkbeck and my brother are charged with unfairness in their statements, because they do not apply to the situations the writers had - chosen, one or which was fifty, and the other four hundred miles from the English Settlement. There are at the Illinois as in almost all other countries, situations pleasant and unpleasant, healthy and unhealthy, and that emigrant does not act a very wise part, who fixes on a station unless he had carefully examined it himself, or at least had the recommendation of some intelligent friend who would scorn to mislead him. Emigration to America, after all that has been written on the subject, and the various advantages it certainly presents to different classes of society, is an affair of such importance, that those who propose it should seriously reflect on the turn of their own mind, their disposition, habits, circumstances, &c. Some who have emigrated to America find themselves as unhappy there as they were in their own country. Those who are averse to labour, fond of luxuries, and whese minds are rivetted to the artificial distinctions of society in Europe, have found to their cost, that America is not the country for them; and unless they can learn wisdom, and form resolution sufficient to alter some of their habits, and if not to despise, to regard with indifference most of those distinctions, they can never be reconciled to Republican manners and institutions. Respecting a few persons of this description at the Illinois, one of the principal settlers exclaimed: "What are such people come here for ?" For the Notes to the following letters, with "all their imperfections on their head," I am b |