FAILURE OF THE LANCASHIRE COTTON-GROWING COMPANY.

West Coast Times, Issue 96, 8 January 1866, Page 3

FAILURE OF THE LANCASHIRE COTTON-GRO WING COM P AN Y.

(From tho "QueenslandDailyGuardian," Nov. 18.) It was a sad story which was told in the Supreme Court on Tuesday l>3 r the Manager of v the Lancashire' Cotton Company and the men, who' had been working on the estate — a story, too, which will cause, sorrow and vexation in many a li .tie homestead in / and, around Bolton, and among th,e keen, hard-headed, industrious, and intelligent operatives of many a manufacturing district in Lancashire; for it revealed the litter and irretrievable failure of a project in which many of them had V invested their hard-earned, and hardly-to-be-spared, savings — a project, too, which many of them had looked anxiously to as a means of ultimate escape from the unhealthy, precarious, ,and ill-remunerated toil at the mill. Only those who were in Lancashire and mixed with the operatives, three years •ago, can fully realise tho earnest, ardent enthusiasm with which the project of a cotton growing anrl selling" company in Queensland was taken up, offering, as it seemed, to do, a home and certainty of remunerative employment to those among the shareholders who wpre fortunate enough to be elected, to go out to the new land. And, what was better than all, the labours of the pioneers was to be of a kind which would find employment to friends, neighbours, and t^S- fellow operatives at home. John Bright, i# one of his speeches at Birmingham, once told a very good story of a Wesleyan prayer meeting being held at a manufacturing village in Lancashire, at which the person who was leading the devotions, among other petitions, * ' prayed that tho Lord would see fit in his wisdom and goodness to so order it that a supply of cotton might be sent to England, so that the industry, on which they all depended for daily bread, might again flourish. To this, one of tho persons present, with great earnestness responded, "Yea, Lord, but not from Surat." The Surat cotton was so dirty, so short in the staple, and so difficult to work, that it completely terrified the spinners who had been working on the long staple American cotton, and afterwards had to adapt their < machinery to this kind. No doubt the poor fellow who responded with such unction had had a taste of the difficulty of working Surat cotton. "When the Queensland Cotton Growing and Selling Company was about starting in Bolton • some one in the neighborhood of Bolton received, in a letter from Queensland, a few pods of Sea Island cotton, picked from the trees in the Brisbane Botanic Garden. It is hardly >to be credited ' how these pods wero handed about among friends and neighbors, who M-ere all engaged in the spinning, and whose machines had been altered to work Surat cotton. The critical eye of the spinner could detect a bundled excellences in the Queensland cotton that the ordinary observer would fail to sec, and .tile infinite superiority of that kind over Surat cottou was a never-ending theme of praise. When told that there wero thousands upon thousands of acres of land to be had in Queensland for a merely nominal sum, on which such < 'cotton as they held in their hands could be produced, tho enthusiasm of the men could scarcely be retained within reason? £ble bounds, and when the Queensland Cotton Growing and Selling Society started, many a one went without a meal in order to pay in his subscription to expedite the transfer of either / himself or fellow members to the new land of promise. * That was only four years ago — scarcely ■j so long, perhaps. About thirty men y/ere sent out, land was taken up on the Pjnipama River under the Cotton Regu\i ' l&tlons, and after three years of hard ♦jwork, hard fare, and innumerable pri- ' ' rations PH the, part of the wen who have

been cngr.gcd -inu tho block, it has all ended in a complete failure ; the manager lias been obliged to sell the land for any price he could got, to meet the liabilities on the estate, and tho men are all at loggerheads with him, and suing him for wages for the time they have been at work on the company's estate. Wo have no wish to enter upon tho discussion of the points in dispute between Mr Loo the manager, and the men. It

would be difficult to say which side was most in fault, or, indeed, whether any blame at all could justly bo attached to cither side. When Mr Lee took up the land on the Pimpama, he found that the rules of tho company at home were not applicable to a company in Queensland ; so a new company — he says a Queensland branch of tho homo company — was formed, but no articles ojf association wero i signed by the men working on tho estate, although they were share-holders of the home country, who had been drafted off, or elected to come to Queensland and work on the estate. As they eamo out Mr Leo received them. and took them down to Pimpama, where they seem to have all worked and fared very much alike. The land orders they brought over wero handed to the manager, and he disposed of them for the purpose of purchasing stores and other necessaries. An .£lB land order would realise about £14 10s, among tho Brisbane speculators ; so each man who had a land order was credited with a ha:f paid-up share L 25 in the Queensland Company. When" lan . orders to emigrate ceased to bo transferable, the men were told that, they would 1 ivvo to work out a share. * But things grew worso and worse at Pimpama, and some of the men began to leave j so to prevent this and make another effort to render tho undertaking a success, it was decided that each man should sign a formal agreement" with the manager under the Queensland Masters aud Servants Act, by which they undertook 'to serve him for six months at stated wages and rations ; at the same time, according to the statement of the manager, it was agreed that theso documents should not bear a literal interpretation, but that each workman or shareholder on tho estate, should take a fair share of the proceeds from the estate. Tho new arrangement worked no better than the old, and i.t length Mi*. Lee (the shareholders say without' the knowledge or consent of them or his fellow directors) sold the estate and, two of tho men sued him in tho Supreme Court, on Tuesday, on the agreement for wages to .which wo have before alluded. The jury, with characteristic impartiality, gave a vevdict for tho plaintiff in ono case, and for the defendant in the other. As we said bofore, wo re not disposed to discuss the question as to whether the men wero bona fide shareholders in the Queensland Company, or whether they wero not, or whether Mr Lee acted justly or unjustly to the others in disposing of tho estate tho in manner he has done. Tho point to which we wish to draw attention is, that the whole scheme is a failure. It is admitted on all hands that no kind of management could have' prevented it from, becoming such under the circumstances, and it is another proof of the grievous errors into which even intelligent men in England fall by attempting to cany out coloniscition on tho co-opc-rativo principle. The labor which, during tho last threo years, has been devoted to the cultivation of land, from which tho laborers have derived no remuneration whatever, might have been, and would have been, devoted to. other, and really profitable purposes if tho men had been free to choose for themselves when they landed hero. We never remember any association for colonisation purposes which could, even by courtesy, be called successful. From the Home Colonisation experiment by Robert Owen, at Harmony Hall, to the .New Zealand Nonconformist Colonisation Society — all have proved failures. It is very easy, and to some extent pleasing, to sit' at home and imagine a band of emigrants going out into the wilderness in a new colony, with axes and spades, to till the earth aud subdue it, but the realisation of such a scheme is very difficult and disagreeable. The* wilderness takes a vast amount of time and labor to subdue it, sufficiently to make it yield a subsistence, and during all that time there are tools to purchase, stores to bo found, and a number of other expenses to be incurred, which a.ro never dreamt of by men who have never been out of England. After a fow years colonial experience, if a man has health, physical strength, and pluck enough to fight through the fiivst difficulties, ho is successful. Tho new chum is almost certain to be beaten, cither through want of experience, want of capital, or the hard work, hard living, and change of climate. If emigration associations are formed in England, let tho regulations bo such as will leave J,ho emigrant at perfect liberty to take what course ho thinks best on landing in the country of his adoption. He will then have a fair chanco of success, because even in Queensland here, we have more than sufficient room for every man in the United Kingdom, who thinks well to settle amongst us. But, it is impossible for any man coming out here ,to say beforehand what particular pursuit he will engage in, more particularly during tho first year of his residenco in the colony. Ho must not be bound to resido in any particular locality, or cultivate cotton plants, sugar canes, coft'ee, or corn- -not bound even to cultivato land at all, or engage in any other special pursuit, but must be perfectly lrce to take that course which seems best to Mm on arrival in his adopted land. If he is made of the right stuff, ho succeeds in tho end, /although it may not be until he has learned experience by repeated failures. ,

A planter in Arkansas recently refused to roleuso his negroes because ho haclrccoived no official notico of tho Emancipation Proclamation. Ifo was afterwards arrested, lectured, and dismissed with a fine of 50 <\oh,- New YwhTrthw ',