HARD TIMES AND THEIR CAUSE.

Grey River Argus, Volume XII, Issue 1154, 10 April 1872, Page 4

HARD TIMES AND THEIR CAUSE.

Similarly circumstanced, as being in a new country, with people of like origin and tendencies, Australian colonists are left to jadgo how ranch of the following remarks, from a Calif ornian journal, apply to our position in the present day :— "We are fast becoming a nation of schemers to live without genuine work. Our boys are not learning trades, our farmers' sons are crowding into cities, looking for clerkships and post offices ; hardly one American girl out of a hundred will do housework for wages, however urgent her need; so we are sending to Europe for workmen and buying of her artisans millions worth of products that we ought to make ourselves. Though our- crop of rascals is heavy, we do not grow our hemp ; though 'we are overrun with lads who deserve flagellation, we import our willows. 'Our women (unless deceived) shine Jn European fabrics ; our men .dress in foreign clothes ; the toys which amuse our younger children. have generally reached us, over the sea. We are like the farmer who hires his neighbor's sons to cut his wood, feed his stock, and run his errands, while his own boys lounge at the grog-shop, ' playing billiards, and then wonders why, in spite of his best efforts, he sinks annually deeper into debt, until the sheriff clears him out, and he starts West to begin again. We must turn over a new leaf. Our boys and girls must be taught to love labor by qualifying themselves to do it efficiently. We must turn out fewer professionals and more skilled artisans, as well as food-growers. We must grow and fabricate two hundred millions worth per annum that we now import, and so reduce the foreign debt that we have so long and so successfully augmented year by year. We must qualify our clever boys to erect and run factories, furnaces, rolling-mills, tanneries, machine shops, <fee. ; to open and work mines, improve ard fashion implements, and double the present product of their father's farm. So shall we stem the tide of debt that sets steadily^ against , our shores, and cease to be visited and-an-noyed by hard times."