The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1870.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2264, 9 August 1870, Page 2

The Evening Star TUESDAY, AUGUST 9, 1870.

It is a question that occasionally recurs to our minds—Of what use is a Warden’s Report 1 Is it intended by requiring those gentlemen periodically to write to the Government, telling of the state of matters in the district, merely to keep them vigilant as to th6ir "ditties, or are their reports to prove of any practical value to us in pointing to the best mode of employing our population! We have some two or three hundred men walking about Dunedin idle, and when we ask why, we are told they cannot find work. We have correspondents writing to us in doleful, grains, condemning immigration, and murmuring about the cruelty of inducing people to come to a country where there is nothing to do. We have others complaining day by day abodt bad times, and talking of leavings where so little profit is to be made. Old Colonists look gloomily upon our prospects, and shallot politicians are contriving all sorts qf schemes to provide 98*piflyS9Wt for the, people. One sees bur'tsalvation) >in ' iprbtective duties—another in free selection; a third in

the ; a fourth ip- But tlierfiia ari industry on which our un•emnldyecl men might-fall back, which dunhg the past twelve months has yielded double the result of the previous year. The report from the Queenstown district, published yesterday, is full of instruction, hirst as to the increased yield of more than £IOOO worth of gold per week over last year. While our European fel-low-colonists have been crying out against immigration, and writing column after column in the newspapers to prove that those who come must starve, there has been actually a large immigration of Chinese, who not only find that they do not starve, but who are so well satisfied with what they get here that they are continually inducing others to follow them hither. The statistics given in the report compare two quarters —the one ending March 31st, the other June 30th. During the first quarter about one-half of the miners in the Queenstown district were Chinese —the numbers being 668 Europeans and 635 Chinese—but in June these proportions had changed ; so that while the European miners remained the same, the Chinese had increased to 733. If we were to point out this fact to the two or three hundred unemployed here, we should be told that the Chinese were satisfied with what would not keep an Englishman, and a vast amount of nonsense would be talked about living on rice and feeding themselves with chop-sticks. It is all very well to indulge in banter of that sort in comparing the two races, but.it does not alter the fact that by this frugality the Chinese attain the object they come to Otago to effect, and which differs materially from that which Europeans have in view. A Chinaman does not come as a settler—he comes to make capital. He brings no wife, and contrives to live at as little expense as is consistent with sustaining him in health and bodily strength. He has come to live, to labor, to save and to return to his own country with the capital he has made. We do not know how long the Chinaman who was robbed of £6OO had been in accumulating that treasure. Certainly not very long, for it is only some three years since the first Mongol set his foot in Otago. If therefore he could have realised so much in so short a time, a European whose object it is to make Otago his home could, at least, have made a comfortable income- We do not understand the organisation of the Chinese, but it seems a very admir- : able adaptation of means to an end. Our own system of colonization appears to fall far short of it. When a batch of Mongolians arrives there is no loss of time. No sooner are they landed than without confusion they seem to go direct to their work. Everything appears to be planned and settled before hand. This forms a marked contrast to our own happy-go-lucky system. When immigrants arrive from England or Scotland they are left to make their own individual arrangements. Very few come with any accurate knowledge of what they will turn thenhands to. If they know a trade, they do not know wher-e their services will be required; if they are unskilled laborers, they hang about the town unknown, and often suffer considerable hardships before they can get work. They know nothing of the country, and if .they did, very often they have not the means of going into the interior. We have had long controversies in the columns of our morning contemporary about co-operative stores, and other means of promoting the welfare of the Colony. It is not very likely that these crude schemes can succeed in the presentcircumstancesof the Province, as the necessary conditions are wanting. Co-operation, to be profitable, must adapt itself to circumstances. It is to this adaptation of it to a specific purpose that the Chinese succeed so well. If then it is so profitable to them, and if such results are attainable through its agency, is it beyond the genius of the European race to devise a plan by which their labor %n be equally profitably directed 1 ■ Surely this question is of more immediate moment than many of those trivialities which now engage public attention, and he who can point out the way by which the unemployed labor of the Province can be profitably organised on the goldfields, will deserve the thanks of the community as a public benefactor. We ought not to be too proud to take a hint from the Chinese.