Note 134 — Chapter XVIII
Reading edition
It must be recognised also that in Great Britain emigration has, during the last three centuries, tended in all probability in the same direction as the various forms of social selection—namely, to the deterioration of the home population; for in all ages it is the bold and enterprising persons who seek new homes in far countries, leaving the weakly, the timid, the dull, and the defective behind in the mother country. Even the convicts that we exported at one time to our colonies were probably persons of more than average capacity, though some of them may have been innately defective in moral disposition.