THE LABOR QUESTION.

Mount Ida Chronicle, Volume IV, Issue 242, 24 October 1873, Page 7

THE LABOR QUESTION.

. . A Queensland paper has the following •• —lt is plain that Europe is beginning to feel great anxiety with regard to the outflow ofifcslife.blood in the shape of the vast masses of its working classes now weekly,- if not daily, emigrating to Ame-. Rica and the British colonies ; and that the difficulty of supplying their places has become a matter of very serious consideration to our leading political economists. Already, wages of ail descriptions have risen 25 per cent, within tlie last ■ twelve months in all the agricultural and. manufacturing districts of' England, while in Germany, France, and even Bussia, a corresponding rise Ims set in. But it is not so much the rise in wages that eraharasses the economist as the convic- r tion that the evil is increasingandnomcaus S -presents itself by which it can be remedied. The extraordinary expansion of any kind of industry, the variety of new ones discovered within the last thirty .years, have made a demand upon working populations, diminished by ernigratiou; which cannot be met, and we shall soon' now be having Europe bidding against America and Australia for her own people. With such a state of tilings looming an tho distance, and not very far off either, it behoves our Government to prepare some scheme by which we can outbid competition, for the present one won't do much longer, otherwise greater attractions will bo_ brought to bear against us, and we shall eventually be.compelled to look to India for our bone and sinew. At the present moment England is beginning to show her alarm at the'scarcity of labor and the increase of her emigration ; and in Germany the want of labor is so much felt, that a large number of landlords have caused enquiries to bo made at New York whether farm laborer;; who have' emigrated would ieai incliued to return, if their passages were paid back again, but the reply to this interrogatory was markedly unfavorable, anil stated that although new arrivals at first grumbled a little and were dissatisfied, yet, after a while, when" they had picked up the language and- be : " g<m to earn money with an ease which they never could do at home, that they expressed no desire to return, that the. longer they remained in America the less they wished to leave it, and that those who were desirous of going back, were not worth having. Besides, strikes are flourishing over' the whole of Northern , Europe, and Germany is hit pretty hard in this line. . For instance, although wages-arc pretty high, a-first;class stone- \ mason and carpenter in Berlin earns from I 4js. to £3 12s. a-week, and ship carpen- ' te'rs' at the Government yards at Dantzig ! and .Kiel have nearly all ceased work, and are being replaced by Swedes and Danes. In the South of Germany, we observe, the same state of affairs exists, and although very liberal wages are offered at Strasbourg for laborers at the new line of forts but few Germans could be procured, and tho Government now .employ some 500* Italians, who are satisfied, work well, to the full satisfaction of the engineers in charge, and save money owing to their frugal habits. .That we"shall be shut out from home labor, we feel satisfied ; it is only a question of time. "~ln the meantime it is quite as well to get as much as we can in the. interim.