THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRATION.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 5083, 9 July 1877, Page 3

THE BENEFIT OF EMIGRATION.

(Written for the New Zealand Times.) In the previous part of the paper on this subject, which has already appeared in the columns of the New Zealand Times, we took occasion to di'aw attention to tlie social condition of the English agricultural laborers, with the intention of showing how greatly they can improve that condition by migrating to this distant country, and settling themselves down quietly and comfortably on a portion of the sunny lands of New Zealand. We have referred to this part of our subject before, and we may speak with some authority on it. We are able to refer to onr own father, who for five and forty years did his duty (God knows how well), and acted as pastor in one of the largest parishes in the county of Oxfordshire. Every pastor who has committed to his charge the care of souls in any parish in England, has a large amount of work thrown upon his shoulders. In a previous part of these papers we took occasion to refer to the opportunities which have, in the course of life, been afforded to us, of knowing the condition, the habits of life, and the prospects of the “ working classes” in England. And since our leaving England, some sixteen years ago, the change has been very small. We doubt, in fact, if there has been any real change at all. It used to be, and is we believe now at the present day, a common remark to make: that the “lower classes” (as they are usually called) do not live, they only exist. And glad they are to obtain the necessaries of life, which are eked out to them as a matter of pure charity. We can give illustrations, not from novels, not from any works of fiction, but from the incidents of stern, hard, downright reality which we think will show to onr readers what we mean. We have known instances (we are not speaking now from imagination, we are speaking from the stern realities of life, and we are referring to circumstances which actually occurred under our own eyes). We will therefore continue our narative, which our readers will readily understand.

We have known instances ot a man and his wife and seven children, when wages fell for a short time, having for that short time to live on nine shillings per week. How they managed it we cannot tell ; but manage it they did, and at the same time they were able to keep clear of debt. Again, we have often been in the fields in midwinter, when the snow, was lying thick upon the ground, when the sheep on each farm were folded in the turnip ground, with nice warm sheds covered and carpeted with wheat-straw for their protection at night, and we have watched boys of thirteen and fourteen years old cleaning the turnips and chopping them up in a machine to be given to the folded sheep. Up and in the field at sunrise with biting frost and but scanty food, we have seen these boys cleaning the turnips with chilblains on their hand, and scarcely able from the cold to hold the turnip knives with which they were getting the sheep’s fodder. The remuneration which they received for this severe work was the handsome sum of 3s. 6d. per week. Look, again, at the women who go out to ho D the turnips or the wheat as soon as the crop is high enough to enable them to detect the tares from the corn. They toil all day, they have to make up for the wear and tear which a work of that sort must cause to their wearing apparel and boots and shoes, and they receive for this hard work the munificent sum of BJ. per day. We could give innumerable illustrations of the same kind. We can remember only too well having often stood in the belfrey of our parish church at Homo—my father’s.own church—at Easter and at Christmas (for the distribution occurred twice a year), and having served out meat in small quantities to the oldest or poorest inhabitants of the parish. "The facts were these ; A sum of money had been left years before for the purpose of supplying the most needy of the parishioners with a taste of meat on the recurrence of the two great religious festivals of the English Church, ,viz., Easter and Christmas. The money was invested, and the interest was annually applied for the purposes ot the trust, and for those purposes only. We remember how some of the oldest and neediest of the parishioners would walk from one ot the outstanding hamlets, distant it may he two and a half or three miles, to get perhaps three or four pounds of fresh meat; how they would gloat over it on receiving it, and that would be the only bit ot fresh animal food which they would taste from year’s end to year’s end ; many would have to be turned away because the supply was not equal to the demand, and would move off with the sad reflection that there was no hope for a hit until the next distribution ot the fruits of the charity. The circumstances of the agx'ieultural classes being such as we have described, in ninetynine cases out ot a hundred they have no opportunity of leaving their homes, and by moving about among strange scenes, and by enlarging their views, accustoming themselves to “ make a shift,” as they would call it, and so bettering their ohanches iu life. In England amongst the class to which we are referring at the present time wo suppose that there are hundreds of thousands who have never even seen a railway. Erom Monday morning to Saturday night it is one incessant and continued course of drudgery. He is a lucky man amongst the class to which we are more especially referring in this article, who is able, without the danger of getting into difficulties, to go into the alehouse on a Saturday night, when the labors ot the week are over, and call for his pint of two-penny beer and his screw ot tobacco. There can be no doubt on the mind of any person who has any authentic acquaintance with the subject that the English agricultural laborer is both overworked and

underpaid. The reason of this it is not. difficult to discover. The fee-simple of the .soil is for the most put vested in large landed proprietors, either titled noblemen or country squires, possessed of large landed estates in the aggregate, which are sub-divided into tenant-farms, averaging we may say from 200 to 500 acres in extent. No very large landed proprietor could take charge of the whole of his own estate. He is generally a member of Parliament ; he has all sorts of duties to perform as a county magistrate, &e., &c., and has not the time to overlook the management of his large hereditary estates. Underneath him then comes the tenant-farmer, who has to make up to his landlord, who is the owner of the soil, his yearly rent. The tenant farmer, therefore, has to extract as cheaply as possible the product of the soil, and so to make his living. After paying first of all to his landlord the rent of the soil, or in other words, a very large proportion of its produce, the next in rotation, the tenant farmer, has to make his living for himself and his family out of the profits arising from the produce of the soil ; and though, of course, he cannot expect to vie with his landlord in his expenditure and style of living, still, he expects to be able to make a very different appearance to that which the lowerclasses can be able to make. In fact the tenant farmers of the present day have been for some years creeping up, and they now live in a very superior style to that which we were accustomed to note amongst them twenty years ago. Often these two classes however follow_the handworkers ; the men who, by the sweat of their brow, produce from the sail the soil the commodities which are in reality the “ wealth of nations.” And as they are at the bottom of the scale, they of course receive the least benefit from the fruits of their labor. First, the owner of the soil, from which the wealth is produced, he receives the greater or lyon’s share ; then the tenant-farmer or overseer (for we may call him so), who receives the next proportion of profit ; and lastly the agricultural laborer, who performs the manual labor by means of which the wealth is produced, and who comes in for a scanty provision after his superiors have been satisfied. We have given, we think, a fair picture of the state of the labor market in the agricultural districts in England, and an impartial sketch of the causes which have led to the present state of affairs so far as regards the laboring classes. Now take the reverse side of the picture, and look at the opportunities which present themselves to these very people for ameliorating their condition and establishing themselves and their posterity in an independent and very much more comfortable position than they at present occupy. We do not hesitate to say that any steady man belonging to the class who have been more particularly referred to in this paper, who comes out to New Zealand with a firm determination to “ put his shoulder to the wheel,” who abides by that determination, and who is prepared to put up with a few discomforts at first, is certain in the course of a very short time to secure to himself a moderate competency, and will never regret the step he has taken. And mark the contrast between the two, instead of Ms 9s. or 12s. per week (and we are now reminding our readers of facts stated in a previous portion of this paper), an industrious man in New Zealand can easily earn his 6s. or Bs. per day. Instead of his hard dry crust of bread and cheese he will get his fresh meat three times a day, and that is about the number of times on which the average of English laborers taste fresh meat during the 365 days of the year. Then there is the climate; we know well what an English winter is. We have had many a day’s skating, and many a day’s lark-shooting when the snow lay six inches deep on the ground, and when the poor cottagers were unable to do more than obtain fuel enough to keep themselves alive. But there is no such thing as that here, in New Zealand. The climate is peculiarly adapted to suit the constitutions of the Anglo-Saxon race. It is to ba hoped that many a young:English farm laborer may be induced to shake off the trammels by which he is surrounded, and make up his mind to come half way across the world, and help to make the islands which have been so frequently referred to as the Britain of the South, a worthy scion of the mother country. Above all things nothing can be more advantageous to New Zealand than the advent of young English farm laborers with their young wives. Some few will no doubt grumble at first, ami not understand having to go out and “ rough it ” for a time in the outskirts of ,the settled districts. But that feeling soon dies away, and we know from personal experience that as the new comers get up thenhouses, as they begin to get their few head of stock and their poultry around them, as they begin to feel something, as it were, behind them, the spirit of'independence asserts itself, and the grumbling becomes a thing of the past. The benefit to the agricultural laborers who emigrate from England to the Australasian colonies at the present time is, in our opinion, incalculable. We have come nearly to the end of our subject in the present paper; but we would like to call attention, before we finish, to one most important point, and that is the dread that the wives have of crossing the water. The night before leaving home, to take his passage in a ship from Gravesend, the writer of this paper went into a. cottage to wish good-bye to an old shephered and his wife, with whom he had been intimate for many years. On many a night has he gone out with this same shepherd, and with the snow lying thick upon the ground, up to the “ ewe pen,” to see how the sheep were getting on. On wishing good-bye, as he was about to leave home next day for New Zealand, the old shepherd’s wife, who had done many a good day’s work for the family, remarked that she thought he wasvery foolish to goby water—that she would like to try'her fortune in New Zealand, but that if she did, she would go the whole way by land. Not wishing to enter into a controversy on the subject the person whom she was addressing gracefully retired, and he has not, we believe, as yet accomplished her proposed overland passage to the antipodes. This is only given as an illustration of the want of knowledge which exists amongst the classes (more especially) who live in what we have called in a previous part of this paper “ Central England.” The truth is they want a little gentle encouragement, and a prudent amount of information from persons whom they know well and in whom they have confidence. But if they can only be persuaded to emigate in moderate numbers, it seems to be a self-evident tact that they must better their condition. They are the class of people which New Zealand requires; they are the sterling men who can be relied upon for doing a good honest day’s work, and who rather pi-ide themselves than otherwise on the amount of work which they are able to do. We have seen them tried, and they have not been found wanting, and no better thing can happen to New Zealand than a very large influx, if it were possible to obtain it, of this class, to cultivate the soil, to settle down, and to build up for their families a position which will enable them in after years, when we and our contemporaries are laid under the turf, to take up a position worthy of themselves, worthy of the great nation from which they have sprung, worthy of the country of their adoption, and worthy too of the cause of colonisation, which will owe their “ English hearts and English hand” such a deep debt of gratitude.