Page 4 Advertisements Column 4

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume V, Issue 179, 1 August 1870, Page 4

FIFTEEN REASONS AGAINST EMIGRATION. Addressed to my fellow-countrymen in England. [bv a working- man] [The reductio ad. absurdum. is a powerful weapon when placed in skilful hands, and we know of no journal more capable of wielding it than the Australasian. Take the following for example.] 1. Ifyou are an unskilled laborer and come out to Australia, you will earn from Sd. to lOd. an hour; if a skilled artisan, from ls. to 15d. an hour; and as the necessaries of life are so much cheaper here than in England, you will be exposed to the temptation of spending your superfluous j earnings upon beer and skittles, or of speculating I in mining shares. 2. You will only work eight hours a day, and | will thus enjoy an abundance of dangerous L isure, which entails the risk of your dedicating it to I idleness and vice. J 3. Bread and meat are so cheap in Australia j that your wife will be liable to become fat and saucy, and your children will be able to attain : such a robust stamina, that they will successfully defy the diseases whicli are so instrumental in reducing the surplus population at home. 4. The state in Victoria annually sets apart so large a sum of money for the free education of the people, that your offspring can hardly avoid growing up better informed than yourself, to the subversion of all domestic discipline and of those principles of equality which are so precious in your eyes. 5. If you are prudent and industrious in these colonie-:, you cannot help becoming a capitalist in the course of a few years, and you will thus recruit the ranks of those who are the natural enemies of labor. You will wear broadcloth, fare deUcftt-rr-ly, lodge sumptuously, and entertain conservative views of property, as representing accumulated or consolidated industry. Can you regard such a change in any other light than as a misfortune ? 6. Po long as you continue a member of the operative classes, you will be able to dictate to ! your employer, instead of being dictated to by him ; and this, like all novel circumstances, is productive of embarrassment. 7. There is nothing to prevent you from becoming a justice of the peace, a member of parliament, or a minister of the Crown in Australia, and encountering the anxieties and responsibilities of making and administering the laws under which we live. You will escape all this by remaining where you are. 8. There are no poor-rates, no poor-law guardians, and no union workhouses in these colonies; consequently every man is under the necessity of making some sort of provision for old age, or a rainy day. These are hard lines for us at this end. of the world, are they not ? The inference is obvious — stop at home. 9. Public libraries have been established in the principle cities of Australia free to all comers. This is but one illustration out of many of the way in which colonial Governments ignore the interests of booksellers and newsmen, and will give you an idea of what people have to put up with out here. io. There are no benevolent societies to bestow 7s. 6d. and a tin medal upon a prize labourer who has brought up ten children upon Bs. a week, without ever receiving any parochial relief. Where are the rewards of virtue in communities like these 1 11. If you emigrate, you will miss thc east winds, the fine, full-flavored fogs, the sharp frosts, the heavy snow, the gentle thaws, and the penetrative slush which communicate such a charming variety to an English winter, and furnish such inexhaustible subjects for the artists of illustrated newspapers. 12. The Government of Australia will almost force you to become a landed proprietor, and this involves the frightful peril of your children or your children's children some day becoming part and parcel of a territorial aristocracy in this corner of the globe. Consider what your feelings would be if you were to return to the world a century hence, and were to discover your posterity enrolled among the county families of Victoria, or New South Wales, or Tasmania, or yourself referred to as having "come over" and settled in such and such a place a certain number of years before the declaration of independence, while a fabulous English genealogy would be provided for you by a colonial Burke or Debrett. 13. If you migrate hither and make a fortune, nobody will touch his hat to you, nobody will care to ask who your grandfather was, and educated cynics will sneer at you as belonging to the " wealthy lower orders ; " all which will be very hard to bear. 14. When Christmas comes round in Australia, there is no distributing of coals and blankets, no annual dole of 2d. and half-a-quartern loaf, no soup kitchen, no gift of linsey-woolsey petticoats to your wif-, nor of Welsh snuff to your aged mother, by affable churchwardens, and blooming Lady Bountifuls. In short, there is nothing to remind you of the good old times, or of your duty to order yourself lowly and reverently to your betters, and to submit yourself to all your governors, teachers, guardians, spiritual pastors, and masters, 15. If, in spite of all my warnings, you become a citizen of Australia, you will have to relinquish the satisfaction of reflecting that one third of every shilling you contribute to the coffers of the state goes towards defraying the interest of a national debt contracted in fighting battles against people you never saw, for reasons you cannot comprehend, and under circumstances you would never approve of. Iu fact, if you emigrate, all your old insular notions will be turned topsyturvy, and you won't know whether you are standing on your head or your heels. Therefore, I repeat, don't come. We are all doing pretty well and should prefer your leaving our " well alone."