ADVICE TO THE ENGLISH LABOURER.

Waikato Times, Volume VII, Issue 364, 12 September 1874, Page 5 (Supplement)

ADVICE TO THE ENGLISH LABOURER.

Tub Times (June 10) remarks that the end of all the strikes does not seem far off, and it is plain that dur divisions will help to send off to New Zealand, Australia, and Canada, a good many who are sorely wanted there, and will, perhaps, be missed at home. If a man is not satisfied with the old conditions of English industry, or even with the much bettor terms he can get in these days, and if he really believes th.>t he cannot be happy or respectable without a farm of his own, then he will be wise to go where he can get it at once, or, at least, in a year or two. He is only wasting his time here. The tendency of English agriculture is to large farms, large capital, great skill, educated hands, machinery, and professional aids. So far from strikes counteracting that tendency, they greatly aggravate it, for it is becoming every year more necessary to employ machinery, costly manures, and consummate skill, instead of unskilled, underfed, uneducated, and underpaid men. The world, however* is still large enough and young enough for manual labour. Every young couple, at a very moderate cost, and, indeed, in many cases without any cost, may go forth to regions as fair and fertile as our own, and may there realize the paradise they read of at home. They can easily fulfil, not the wild speculation of a demagogue, but the earliest dream of their infancy and the first lesson of their faith — a garden to be tilled in due obedience to the first and great laws of nature. Many will go, and though they will be missed, they will leave a little more elbow-room at home, which we trust they who stay at home will know how to use wisely. The Daily Telegraph (June 10) thinks it is a pity that the struggle of the agricultural labourers of higher wages and for the right to combine should be mixed up with purely political considerations, or with the aims of persons holding advanced opinions on certain debatable topics. Yet, if Mr George Dixon, the member of Birmingham, has his way, the National Agricultural Labourers' Union will become merely an auxiltary to a particular sect of Radical Reformers. Speaking at the Conference of Delegates which was opened yesterday in LBamington, the honourable gentleman is reported as having urged the labourers to agitate for the franchise, because they were specially interested in the disestablishment of the Church, the revision of the game laws, and the laws relating to the tenure and transfer of land. With respect to the first point, all which needs to be said is that if the banded labourers " go in " for disestablishment they will alienate some of their best friends, and will win no equivalent support elsewhere. A cry for disestablishment is certainly a very Irish way of thanking the Bishop of Manchester for his interference in their behalf.