The Evening Star MONDAY, MAY 20, 1871.

Evening Star, Volume IX, Issue 2583, 29 May 1871, Page 2

The Evening Star MONDAY, MAY 20, 1871.

An article on Emigration, reprinted in the Home. News from the Standard newspaper, is well worth the attention of all classes in the Colonics. We know of no subject less understood in its bearings upon individual and Colonial prosperity than this, excepting, perhaps, the question of free trade. We not know of one, as a rule, more distasteful to those who are most interested in extensive and continued immigration. What we want in the Colonies is increased demand. Producers need it in order to secure the best and most profitable market. The working classes need it in order to be secure against those periodical depressions that lead them to complain of want of employment. But it is just one of those questions that it will not do to treat in a superficial manner. The interests of capitalists and workmen are too vital to be played with. Those that are here very naturally consider that they have a priority of claim to consideration, and that their means of employment ought not to be interfered with by the introduction of strangers to supplant them. This, the first impression on the subject, is, however, so far a mistaken view that the adoption of an exclusive system has in every instance proved in the highest degree detrimental to those who sought to retain to themselves constant employment at high wages. The question, Why should I help to bring men from home to take bread out of my mouth 1 is not very easy to answer so as to satisfy an inquirer who has made up his mind that such would be the result. To tell him what is strictly and literally true, that a continued stream of immigration would be the best security for a continuance of good wages, would be very likely indeed, to lead him to look upon any one giving that answer, as an interested opponent or not quite sane. It never occurs to that class of mind to look beyond the surface. When the working men ask that immigration shall not be fostered and encouraged they simply ask that the door shall be closed against those whose coming would give employment. When a carpenter asks that no men and women shall come, he virtually says “I do “ not want any more houses to be built’ “ nor farmsteads to be constructed.” The agricultural labourer says in effect “I want no more land breaking up.” Now what does this imply 1 It implies stagnation with the butcher, the baker, the miller, the tailor, the shoemaker, the wheelwright, the blacksmith, and all other trades. Were the objectors to immigration to protest against over introduction of one class of workers, we should quite agree with them. But that is not their usual style of argument. On the contrary, the custom is to ask dogmatically, even by those who were themselves assisted, that assisted immigration shall cease. As a matter of duty to them, and with a view to the advancement of individual, Provincial, and Colonial interest, we give below a few extracts from the article referred to, because of the clear light in which the truths enunciated are placed. We commend them to careful consideration. The writer says

The colony of the Cape of Good Hope, for instance, is about three times the size of Great Britain, with a population of less than two hundred thousand Europeans. The continent of Australia contains more than two million five hundred thousand square miles, and it is peopled by a million and threequarters of people—a little more than half the population of London. L’o not these figures alone refute the preposterous idea that there is no demand for emigrants to the colonies ? Of course, if wo permit the handful of people already settled on these vast and wealthy countries to rule the stream of emigration, and to bar the door to our national domain, there will never be any considerable increase of population But we contend that the immediate wants of the colonics as to labour are no true index whatever to the demand for emigration. However paradoxical it may sound, it is strictly

true that the necessity for immigration is proved by the very fact that the demand for labour is so small. That in such countrieswhere there is naturally so large a field of employment the demand for labour should be small is only a proof of an unnatural condition of things, of which the true relief is in the resumption of immigration. There is do demand for labor simply because there is no supply, iu such colonies as New South Wales and Victoria. The stoppage of immigration moans the stoppage of enterprise, and the stoppage of enterprise of course creates that temporary surfeit of labour which is absurdly used as an argument against immigration. It is really the bind which demands to he peopled not the community of existing colonists which needs labor. * J * We are told that they (the Colonics) must he peopled gradually, and only by the expenditure of capital, which alone is the support of labor. We know they were not peopled in any such way, but in a manner directly contrary to these laws. Wc know that the prosperity of a colony is iu the exact ratio of the speed at which it is peopled. We know then it was not capital which created labor in any of them, but precisely the reverse—the process having followed that primary and universal law of political economy which teaches us that it is labor which makes ' capital, and not capital labor. Of all fallacies none has been so fully exploded in the history of the colonies themselves as that it is capital which creats wants, which wants again create a field of employment. It_ is quite true, indeed, that a man with nothing will not get rich in Australia or at the Cape ; but that is not the question. What we contend is, that no colony would have been peopled had men followed th“ rule laid down by these anti-cmigrationists, for it is certain that in none of them was capital a preexistent condition. The process of Colonial growth hitherto has been precisely the reverse of that which has been accepted by the Emigration Board and its upholders. It was the natural and undeveloped wealth—the “field of employment”—which first attracted labor—it was labor which created capital. The process is now at a standstill simply because we choose to take the word of those who have succeeded in it to the effect that no further success is possible, instead of insisting upon our sovereign rights of keeping open the field of employment to our children for ever.”