VICTORIAN EMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 215, 16 February 1875, Page 4

VICTORIAN EMIGRATION TO NEW ZEALAND.

[From the Argus, February 2.] We presume that the conclusion arrived at bv the persona who have asked the New Zealand Government whether it will make arrangements to receive and provide for five thousand Victorian diggers is that this colony is over-peopled, and that, therefore, the time has arrived when its surplus population must swarm off. Such a fact —if it were a fact —would be a serious one to face. As it is, however, the movement which has been made at Ballarat is ridiculous, and even more reprehensible than ridiculous. It is a confession, not of national decline, not of diminishing resources and failing industries, but'of individual shiftlessness and feeblemindedness. Our land laws may be faulty, our fiscal system a miserable mistake, and our administration of public affairs very far from what it ought to be, but these evils neither excuse nor justify that want of energy and of adaptability to circumstances which is exhibited by the men who hang about the chief centres of population, and complain of a want of employment, while studiously refraining from the endeavor to seek it in those parts of the country where it might be readily found. People of this stamp are always ready to lay the blame of their impoverished condition upon anybody but themselves. They are always to be found swelling the list of the political and social malcontents. They have a standing grievance against the institutions of the colony, and they cherish an inveterate grudge against some class or some law, either of man or of nature, which they imagine is perpetually operating to prevent them from achieving prosperity at a single bound. If a rush takes place to Northern Queensland,or Carpentaria, or New Zealand, or British Columbia, or South Africa, these restless spirits are sure to take part in it; and when they find their way back to this colony, disappointed and dispirited, they growl at the parsimony of the Victorian Government, because it did not charter a ship for their conveyance to these shores, or undertake to defray their return passages to the land they are always abusing. The egregious and perverse wrong-headed-ness of such malcontents is encouraged and stimulated by local stump-orators and popu-larity-hunting members of the Legislative Assembly, who have neither the manliness nor the capacity to tell the whole tribe of the Micawbers that their idleness is their bane, and their poverty their reproach ; nor to point out to them that, in a country like this, no man with a stout pair of arms and an honest determination to succeed need fear want, or despair of raising himself to a condition of competence. In fact, when we compare Victoria with some European countries which are not equal to this colony in point of soil, climate, and natural advantages, the contrast is really disgraceful to ourselves, and to those classes more especially who are asking the Government of another colony to assist them to emigrate. Take the little kingdom of Belgium, for example, with an area only one-seventh that of Victoria, and two-thirds of its soil naturally ill-adapted for either agricultural or gracing purposes ; and yet the last census shows that it supports a population of 5,113,680, or upwards of 260 to the square mile, that it raises a revenue of over ten millions sterling, and that it has an import trade equivalent to £lO per head of its population, and an export trade equal to nearly £7 per head. We do not learn, however, that any considerable number of miners in Haiuault, Namur, or Liege have sounded the English or French Government as to the possibility of its findingroom for them, or that the Belgians make any complaint of their country being overpeopled. On the contrary, the census tables of the latest date show that 3537 people entered Belgium in 1871 above the number of those who quitted it during the same year, which is actually in excess of our gain by immigration over emigration in the year 1878.