FIFTEEN REASONS AGAINST EMIGRATION.

Evening Star, Volume VIII, Issue 2285, 2 September 1870, Page 2

FIFTEEN REASONS AGAINST EMIGRATION.

Addressed to my Fellow Countrymen in England, By a Working Man. (From the Australasian.) 1. If you are an unskilled labourer, and come out to Australia, you will earn from 9d to lOd an hour ; if a skilled artisan, from Is to Isd an hour ; and as the neccsssaries of life are so much cheaper here than in England, you will be exposed to the temptation of spending your superfluous earnings upon beer and skittles, or of speculating in mining shares. 2. You will only work eight hours a day, and will thus enjoy an abundance of dangerous leisure, which entails the risk of your dedicating it to idleness or vice. 3. Bread and meat are so cheap in Australia that your wife will be liable to become fat and saucy, and your children will be able to attain such a robust stamina, that they will successfully defy the diseases which are so instrumental in reducing the surplus population ut home. 4. The state in Victoria annually sets apart so large a sum of money for the free education of the people that your offspring can hardly avoid growing up better informed than yourself, to the subversion of all domestic discipline, and of those principles of equality which are so precious in our eyes. 5. If you are prudent and industrious in these colonies, you cannot help becoming a capitalist in the course of a few years, and you will thus recruit the ranks of those who are the natural enemies of labour. You will wear broadcloth, fare delicately 7, lodge sumptuously, and entertain conservative views of property, as representing accumulated or consolidated industry. Can you regard such a change in any other light than as a misfortune ? 6. So long as you continue a member of the operative classes, you, will be able to dig? tate to y T our employer, instead of being die; tated to by him ; and, this, like all other novel circumstances, is productive of embarrassment. 7. There is nothing to prevent your becoming a justice of the peice, a member of -Parliament, or a Minister of the Crown in Australia, and encountering the anxieties and responsibilities of making and administering tbc laws under which you like. You will escape all this by remaining where you are. 8. Thera are no poor-rates, no poor law guardians, and no union work-houses in these colonies ; consequently every man is under the noco-sity of making some sort of provision for old age or a rainy day. These are hard lines for ue, at this end of tho world, are they not '! The inference is obvious—stop at home. 9. Public libraries have been established in the principal cities of Australia, free to all comers. This is but one illustration out of many of the ways in which colonial go : vernments ignore the interests of booksellers and newsmen, and will give you ah idea qf what tho people -have to put up with out here. 10. There are no benevolent societies to bestow 7s 6d and a tin medal upon a prize labourer who has brought up ten children upon 8s a week, without ever receiving any parochial relief. Where are the rewards of virtue in communities like these 11. If you emigrate you will miss the east winds, the fine full-flavored fogs, the sharp frosts, the heavy snow, the gentle thaws, and the penetrative slush, which communicate such a charming variety to an English winter, and furnish such iuexhaustable subjects for the artists of illustrated newspapers. 12. The Government in Australia will almost force you to become a’ landed proprietor, and this involves the frightful peril of your children or your children’s children some day becoming part and parcel of a territorial aristocracy in this corner of the globe. Consider what your feelines would be if von were to return to the world a century hence and were to discover yonr pos-

terity enrolled among the country families of Victoria, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, and yourself referred to] as having “ come over” and settled in such and such a place a certain number of years before the declaration of independence, while a fabulous English genealogy would be provided for you by a colonial Burke or Dcbrett.

13. If you migrate hither and make a fortune, nobody will touch his hat to you, nobody will care to ask who your grandfather was, and educated cynics will sneer at you as belonging to “ the wealthy lower orders all which will be very hard to bear. 14. When Christmas comes round in Australia there is no distribution of coals and blankets, no annual dole of 2d and half a quartern loaf, no soup kitchens, no gift of linsey-woolsey petticoats to your wife, nor of Welsh snuff to your aged mother, by affable churchwardens and beaming Lady Bountifuls. In short, there is nothing to remind you of the good old times, or of your duty to order yourself lowly and reverently to your betters, and to submit yourself to all your governors, teachers, spiritual pastors, and masters.

15. If, in spite of all my warnings, you become a citizen of Australia, you will have to relinquish the satisfaction of reflecting that one-third of every shilling you contribute to the coffers of the st -tc goes towards defraying the interest of a national debt contracted in fighting battles against people you never saw, for reasons you cannot comprehend, and under circumstance yon would never approve of. In fact, if you emigrate, all your old insular notions will be turned completely topsy turvey, and you won’t know whether you are standing on your head nr on your heels. Therefore, I repeat, don’t come. We are all doing pretty well, and should prefer your leaving our “ well alone. ’