FREE IMMIGRATION.

Globe, Volume IX, Issue 1306, 27 May 1878, Page 3

FREE IMMIGRATION.

On tho proposed resumption of free immigration, the Napier “ Telegraph ” says : Some three weeks ago we published a telegram from Wellington which informed us that the Government had resumed the system of free immigration. The telegram further stated that free passages had been ordered to be provided for 5000 immigrants, so as to enable tho first batches to arrive in this colony by the spring. The information that was thus circulated throughout the country is of no little importance, and it is difficult to account for the fact that it has scarcely attracted any attention. That the Government should have resolved upon such a course without in any way having previously advised Parliament of their intention is sufficiently strange, but it is still more so when it is considered that there has been no demand throughout the colony for an influx of labor. At the present moment, it is safe to say there are more hands than enougli to do the work of the country, and that by springtime, if there should be plenty of employment for all, with a slight increase of wages, it will be nothing but what the working man has a right to expect at the end of a winter. To flood the labor market at that time would bo a cruel wrong to thousands of families ; and it would be as unjust to the new comers as to the old hands. Tho immigrants would, as certainly as in the times gone by, have been induced, to leave England by glowing accounts of the golden prospects of the laboring classes in this colony, and as surely they would be undeceived when they came to realise their position. The late Government did not discover the mistake any too soon of introducing indiscriminately all and sundry who applied for free passages to New Zealand. The pernicious system was stopped in consequence of tho outcry it raised throughout the country, and the system of giving assisted passages to nominated immigrants was adopted. This latter plan has answered admirably; it has supplied all demands, and we have no hesitation in saying that it has been the means of bringing out here an excellent and useful class of industriously disposed settlers. The system had also the additional merit of being within the means of the cojony to sustain. Now, the introduction of 5000 free immigrants means a cost to tho country, at the very lowest computation, of £75,000, and we should like to know where such a sum is to come from. All the loans for public works and immigration have been exhausted, and there does not seem any likelihood of the new two and a-half million loan being raised until its receipt has been anticipated. With the pecuniary difficulties that beset the Government, with the commercial depression in Europe affecting the value of colonial produce, and the gloomy aspect of politics at home, to talk of introducing free immigrants to supplement our labor market is the most quixotic idea that could emanate from the most quixotic of Ministries.