EMIGRATION by Stephen N. Haskell

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 28, 1882

EMIGRATION

By Stephen N. Haskell

Last week we called attention to the thousands flocking to our shores from the Old World, and alluded to the fact that our people have done and are doing but little or nothing to place reading matter before this large number of foreigners as they here seek homes. Thus far, all that has been done in this direction has been by our tract societies in remailing periodicals, and by a few individuals who have acted as colporters among them after they have become located.

This is well, so far as it is practicable among so many, but twenty times more might be accomplished if, in addition to this, reading matter was distributed among them, accompanied with personal labor, before they scatter to the far West. Home and foreign missionary periodicals are noticing this emigration, and in connection with their efforts to enlighten the heathen, they are watching with intense interest the result of the emigration to this country. In the March number of the Illustrated Missionary News is a striking pictorial illustration of a new western settlement, with the following paragraph taken from L’Occident:—

“The emigration during the past year has never had its equal. The rulers of the Old World are alarmed, and are attempting to check the great exodus; but they plan, and legislate, and labor in vain. The movement each month is gathering greater force. This year immigration into this land bids fair to approach a million souls. It touches our eastern shores, but it stops not there; it sweeps across the Alleghanies into the Central States, but it stops not there; it crosses the great Mississippi, and much of it the Missouri also, and stops not till it laps the sides of our lofty mountains, and nestles in the beauteous valleys of the great, great West.”

Shall we, under such circumstances, go plodding along, without making a special effort to place before this large number of persons the light of present truth? May God help us to realize the responsibility which he has laid upon us in giving us a knowledge of the truth, and in placing us in a land which is an asylum for the oppressed,—a land of liberty of conscience.

S. N. HASKELL.