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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 April 2023
Henry Brougham had little time for “thoughtless optimists” when it came to politics. Writing for the Edinburgh Review in 1818, he praised a recent book that advocated for emigration to the United States. Brougham was awed by Morris Birkbeck’s account of the scale and dynamism of the new nation. “A broad, deep, and rapid stream of population is running constantly towards the western parts of the Continent,” he wrote, casting emigration as a force of nature. He observed, dubiously, that “vast states” were forming “towards the Pacific Ocean, the growth of which as much exceeds in rapidity what we have been wont to admire on the shores of the Atlantic.” All this left at an “immeasurable distance” the “scarcely perceptible progress of our European societies.” It was little wonder that England had been left behind. Ravaged by poverty and austerity, Birkbeck’s book had suggested, the beleaguered nation was headed for political disaster.
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