MESSRS HAZELL AND HODG KINS'S REPORT.

Te Aroha News, Volume V, Issue 223, 8 October 1887, Page 7

MESSRS HAZELL AND HODG KINS'S REPORT.

Their report (says the " Daily News," in an article on the subject) has no direct, reference to the statements of Mr Norton, but it helps us to give them the right interpretation. There have been bad times in the Australasian colonies, and there i s no active demand for additional labour of the artisan class. For agricultural labour, however, there is btill a decided demand, though it is not universal ; while in certain localities navvies and labourerß can hardly fail to iind work ; and good female domestic servants always find a place. This differs from what we heard last year, as a statement made with discrimination differs from a statement made without. Taking Australasia as a whole, the reporters , incline strongly to the local belief that "any steady man can get on in this country. " Slackness of work is, in fact, a relative term, and it may mean one thing in England and quite another at the Antipodes. The difference of meaning is the real point of interest in the inquiry. The difficulty of finding work in England is often absolute for lens of thousands of the population. In Australia, according to the local pessimists, it is, in this form, all but unknown ; and " being out of work " often means only a difficulty in getting regular woik at high wages, or without going in search of it. There lias always been a cry of "overpopulation " in Australia, and it has never meant much less that it means now. It is due chiefly to the determination of the colonial working classes to prevent wages from falling below their present level. The danger is no imaginary one, and from the standpoint of class interest theie seems some reason in the colonial view. The New Zealand farmers are beginning to ask for laboureis at wages "fully equal to theaverage wages of agricultural labourers in England." The "fully equal " is a phraseof startling significance, as it seems to show that, in one colony, agiicultural labour has already fallen to the low economic level of* the mother country. It is true that New Zealand promises with the wages the "food and lodging thrown in." But what lodging ? if not what food ? The accommodation, even for permanent hands, is commonly a small hut, with no other furniture than bare bunks along the wall, and with. only such bedding as the occupants supply. In these huts there is no room for and childien, and the married laboureis find it hard to get work. No wonder that, with such an example of the tendency before them, the Australian working folk make an attempt to fight the laws of Nature, in so far as the laws of our present economic science deserve the name. They do fight them most des-peratcly, and they will often keep wages at a level which checks cnterpriso and leaves hundreds of men without employment. The emigration agents quote what may be called the prohibitive rate as the normal one, and the deluded emigrant finds that, although na one is employed below that rate, many, in con&aqucncc of it, are uot employed at all. New South Wales and Victoiia — the latter especially — ofler a strenuous resistance to the law of supply and demand. They have their unemployed, who promenade the streets calling for " work or bread;" but these are not as the unemployed at Home. In Au&tralia univeit=al suffrage makes the common man almost omnipotent. The Government that depends on his vote has accordingly to find him work, at rates that will decently support his family, whenever there is a scarcity of employment in the open market. At Sydney the reporters saw several hundreds of men thus pressing the Government for work. The Government offered- to send them, a few miles away, to cut down bush on piecework. Most of them accepted the offer, but about 200 declined, insisting on being paid by the day at the rate of 6b for eight hours. To offer them less, they said, was " a degradation of labour in New South Wales." The contrast with the opinionsthat prevail on the relief question at Homo is sufficiently striking. With us relief works rarely rank higher in quality, or in public estimation, than a kind of out-door labour test. The difference lies entirely in the point of view of those who give the relicf — there, of those who receive it, the latter being, at the same time, ma&Lers of the political, if not of the economic situation. The report insists strongly on the value of such work as the Emigration Office is doing, and on the need of extending it. Some of the Governments of the colonieshave promised to co-operate in this object, with the Labour Department at Home. It is quite clear thar the time has come to organise emigration, and that of this process the gathering of statistics and the spread of general information form but the initial stage. It is, of course, in the highest degree important to let people know what they may have to expect on landing-, bnfc beyond that some effort must be made to raise their legitimate expectations. Assisted emigration promises to become one of the institutions of the time. The individual emigrant of the class from which emigrants are usually drawn is often quite unequal to the difficulties he has to encoun ter. He may survive the conflict with circurn. stances after a fashion, but too often it i& only as a broken and ruined man. The failures of English exportation must be forming the foundation of a pauper class^in the colonies. Such men may not go out as paupers, indeed the colonies now take their own precautions against that danger, but their failure tends to enlist them for ever under the broad banner of shiftlessness, hopelessness, and faincantise. Many plans have accordingly been started to save the immigrant from the sense of isolation. New Zealand has its special settlements of the village homestead type Under another system, an association of not less than twenty-five persons desirous of settling in company on Crown lands may arrange with the Government for taking a block, in allotments, on deferred payment or perpetual lease. In South Australia there is much the same system. In New Zealand, again, there have been many private efforts to promote the settlement of small landowners. Mr Firth, of Matamata, has laid out a part of his immense estate in fifty-acre sections, which he offers on easy conditions of purchase, extending over ten years, "to industrious men, with or without capital, who wish to acquire comfortable homesteads." Other schemes of the same general character are noticed in the report. It is impossible to doubt that they will largely determine the character of the emigration of the future, if only because they follow the general tendency of the movement of the age. Many co-oporate for every purpose in our day, from the purchase of groceries down toburglary, and individualism is becoming the luxury of genius alone. Most emigrants are not men of genius, but very humble and rather stupid folk who have no power of forming a right estimate of the difficulties that await them in a new scene of labour in a new world. They have a right to demand some help of a judicious sort from their Governments, and, quite apart from that, it is hardly too much to say that they alreadyhave the power. We may live to see the Emigration Office one of the most important of the minor departments of State*