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Writing: The Causes of Emigration

The Causes of Emigration, § 3

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§ 3

As all the activities of human beings are directed towards their happiness, all migrations must be motivated by that and by no other cause. A seaman never goes on board a ship unless he expects to gain more thereby than he could be sure of earning at home; still less does any citizen venture to set foot on foreign soil, intending to stay there, unless he believes that he will in one way or another be more successful there.

On the one hand, he considers the circumstances under which he has hitherto lived and which he may in the future hope to enjoy at home, and he puts those in one scale of the balance; on the other hand, he acquaints himself with the condition that he might achieve in another country and what probability he may have of success there in the future, and he puts that in the other one. If the former preponderate, he will obviously remain, as long as he is human; if the balance remains in equilibrium, there is not yet any reason why he should emigrate; everyone prefers the known to the unknown when there is no difference in advantage; but if the balance tips the other way, then thoughts of going abroad begin to arise.

But one’s fatherland also provides some particular attachments by which it seeks to remain preponderant, which a German author, Johann Reinhard Storck,1 has neatly summed up in Latin: “We love the country that received us when we came into the world,” he says, “where we voiced our first complaint and played in childhood; were brought up and exercised in youth, whose air we have breathed, whose sky we have seen, with whose streams and fields we are familiar, where we can count numerous relatives, friends, properties,2 companions and so many incentives to happiness that we vainly seek elsewhere.”

If all these still cannot outweigh the other factors in someone’s mind, then he must be regarded as lost to the fatherland: he is no longer a true citizen even though he lives within the borders of the country. All regulations are powerless to retain such an individual, except only for one that increases his advantages at home. Such citizens should be regarded as a precious wine in a leaky vessel which, although it cannot all flow out at once, will nevertheless seek a crack through which it will seep out. Prohibitions and overseers may prevent matters from proceeding so quickly, but they have the disadvantage that the longer such lost citizens are retained by force, to all the more people will they describe their anticipated happiness, and they take them with them once they get away.

In vain does one imagine the fatherland to be a magnet that holds its inhabitants in the same way as it attracts iron, or that it operates through some hidden means. It may have been appropriate for Homer to sing in his blessed Greece: Nothing is dearer than one’s fatherland.3 But Socrates and Democritus, who already saw that corruption was prevalent everywhere, only regarded the whole world as such. It was still acceptable for Cicero, who wished to defend the liberty of the Roman Republic that was just then being gambled with, to encourage everyone in his ethical writings to gladly die for the fatherland, though he himself was more suited to be an adviser to such heroes than their leader. Horace sings in the same mode: Sweet it is, he says, and seemly to die for one’s homeland,4 although the fatherland that Cicero had in mind, namely liberty, had already been lost in his lifetime. But 200 years later, when the domestic disasters had come to fruition, one no longer hears of anyone heeding such a call.

Could any of the early Romans, who during their period of expansion regarded it as virtually unthinkable to abscond from the fatherland, as they believed it would soon encompass the entire world, have been made to believe what nevertheless did happen, namely that their descendants would be transformed wholesale into barbarians?

It cost the Israelites many a bloodied shirt to seize Palestine and, in view of their powerful neighbours, even more to retain it as long as it was a land of Canaan. But once their towns, religious cult and trades were overthrown, no one was any longer inclined to risk so much for an unfortunate homeland.

But because this comparison of domestic and foreign advantages occurs in the mind of each separate individual, in accordance with that individual’s understanding, prejudices, power of deduction and taste, innumerable errors are committed in this respect; experience nonetheless becomes an infallible teacher for such renegades.

If their hopes are fulfilled, they regard themselves as fortunate, and in relating their advantages to others, they lay dangerous traps for those who are experiencing the same as they previously did; but if their expectations are dashed, they regret their change of circumstances, return home more pleased with their fatherland than when they left it, or at least their disappointment deters others from following in their footsteps.

This allows me to conclude that the more freedom and opportunity each individual has to promote his happiness in his place of birth, especially in his early years, the less does he wish to exchange his fatherland with anyone else, and on the other hand, the less that he enjoys that freedom, the greater does he feel his misfortune and oppression to be, and the more he yearns to get away. And that oppression, or lack of sufficient freedom to pursue his fortune in any honourable manner, I venture to assert is the one and only cause of all emigration and thus also of that which occurs from our beloved Sweden. If that is denied, one must be capable either of loving something without regarding it as good or else of choosing that for which one feels revulsion.

Whatever else may be adduced as a cause of that is either none at all or merely part of it.

However, with regard to a subject that concerns the origin and destruction of entire states, it is by no means enough to limit oneself to deductions from thought and reason, but they should be made quite incontrovertible on the grounds of long experience; otherwise, it is very likely that the outcome will not match the expectation, and then it is often too late to correct an error that one would immediately have noticed if one had first consulted experience, the instructor of the simple-minded.

  1. The citation is from the chapter “Qvaestio IV. Quare patria prae aliis terris gratissima?”, written by Johann Reinhard Storck (1592–1654), in M. Berneggerus, Ex C. Cornelii Taciti Germania et Agricola questiones miscellaneae, olim moderante Mathia Berneggero, academicis exercitationibus sparsim disputatae, unum in corpus certumque ordinem . . . / edidit Jo. Freinshemius. Argentorati [Strasbourg], 1640. A similar passage can be found in Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia, I:10, 1584.
  2. Chydenius has here added the word ‘properties’. No corresponding word can be found either in Storck or in Lipsius.
  3. Nothing is dearer than one’s fatherland: This is a reference to The Odyssey, book IX (v. 34ff.). Odysseus, telling the Phaeacians his story, explains why neither Calypso nor Circe (both of them beautiful goddesses) was able to keep him: “for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it” (from the translation by Samuel Butler, revised by Timothy Power and Gregory Nagy).
  4. Sweet it is . . . for one’s homeland: The citation is from Horace’s Odes, 3.2.13: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”

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