1857 - Hursthouse, C. New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South [Vol.II.] - CHAPTER XIX. THE PHILOSOPHY OF EMIGRATION.

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CHAPTER XIX.

EMIGRATION.--To treat fully of emigration as a branch of social and political economy, would be to exceed the scope and purpose of a work like the present. But emigrants are so undervalued a class, so much lurking prejudice exists against emigration, its social and national merits are so often ignored, or so partially, so grudgingly admitted, that I trust the reader will allow me to prelude the more practical portion of this chapter with a few remarks expressive of an opinion that emigrants are the most valuable portion of the community which any old over-crowded country can possess; and that emigration, as an old writer quaintly asserts, "is the very best affair of business in which any old country can embark."

Emigrants and emigration have many friends, but they have many enemies--both secret and avowed.

'Tis said that not a few of the great and prosperous like to be surrounded, at a respectful distance, by the lowly and the meek: their mansions are grander, velvets softer, because of the hovels and rags. If every man had opera box, yacht, and flunkey, how many men would there be to whom these things would bring no pleasure! Poor people, poor neighbours, poor dependents, give zest to many a rich man's life, he "could better spare better men;" but these zests escape by emigration, and hence emigration has often the rich man's contumely and spite. Superfine "upper-crust" people, too, either born with the silver spoon," or having made the "silver spoon," affect to look

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on emigration as a punishment for poverty, and will sneer at the emigrant as a sort of superior vagabond. Manufacturing millionaires and the rich employing classes, whose wealth has been wrung out of the suicidal strife of too-abundant labour, and who fancy that the continuance of their prosperity rests on their power to recruit their labour serfs from the serried ranks of near preserves of paupers, naturally but blindly decry emigration---that great highway whereby cheap labour eludes their fatal grip. Thousands of worthy people, vegetating through life in easy peace in the quiet spots they were born in, hold that defiant emigration to any new country is an unnatural offence, and that it is every man's duty to die where he first drew breath; whilst shallow anti-emigrationists liken emigration to a draining of the nation's life blood, regard colonies as costly incumbrances, and utterly blind to the vast national benefits which emigration creates, are solicitous only to detect the minor evils which excess of emigration might entail.

Seeing, then, that emigration has all these enemies on the spot to attack, whilst her best friends (emigrants) are not on the spot to defend; continually hearing as we do of "low Irish emigration," of "assisted emigration," of "pauper emigration," of "convict emigration;" recollecting that the millions who emigrate are for the most part the poor, the unsuccessful, the unfortunate, it is not perhaps to be wondered at that emigrants have come to be looked on as a "Pariah," or lower-caste order of our people; that emigration is regarded not as a noble career which calculating prudence and high enterprise might choose, but as a last resource which failure and misery accept; and that colonies have been legislated for, not as integral parts of the empire, immense sea-joined Devonshires and Yorkshires, but as remote Alsatian dependencies--refuges for the bankrupt, the destitute, and the desperate, the beggar, the outlaw, and the thief.

But it is not, I think, in these lights that posterity will view Colonies, emigrants, and emigration.

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What is emigration? Emigration, I take it, is an inherent principle of animated nature, an instinctive desire common to man and to every living thing in creation to seek the gratification of certain "implanted wants" in those places, which reason in the one, instinct in the other, point out as best suited to supply such wants. Man's emigration, the periodical movements of animals, the migration of birds, the swarming of bees, all spring from this one common principle.

Emigration, indeed, was a necessity of human existence. If the first children of men, vegetable like, had remained stationary in the spot they were born in, had never wandered beyond their natal limits, never emigrated to "fresh fields and pastures new," the time must soon have come when their increased numbers would more than have consumed all the food which such limits could have been made to produce, when one of two things must have come to pass--either they must have adopted some stringent "Malthusian" practice, and have stopped their "foodless increase," or have adopted cannibalism and consumed it.

Happily, with man's desire to increase and multiply, an all-wise Providence coupled man's desire to seek space for his increase and multiplication, to emigrate; and the glorious result of emigration is, that instead of the human race being still confined to a handful of skin-clad shepherds tending their scanty flocks on Eastern hills, it is a thousands millions of sentient beings endowed with the divine light of reason, and enjoying the blessings of existence in every fair province of iho earth from pole to pole.

The pages of Holy Writ, of ancient and modern history, teem with encouragements and illustrations of emigration. When the Lord said unto Abraham, "Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will show thee: and I will make of thee a great nation, and bless thee, and make thy name great," Abraham departed, and he was an emigrant, and planted a colony. Classic history's mightiest heroes

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were many of them great emigrant [Greek word] who planted colonies. Carthage and the Grecian States sprang from emigration. The chief, who led his followers from Gaul to Albion, was an emigrant planting a colony, the colony of Ancient Britons; and if European emigration and the planting of colonies had stopped here, England might still have been inhabited by a handful of ragged savages worshipping the mistletoe and idol gods. But European emigration did not stop here, it continued to flow into Britain. The aboriginal British savages were destroyed by, or amalgamated with, successive warrior-emigrant bands of Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans; and thus mongrel emigration created what, step by step, has grown into the great Anglo-Saxon race of 1857.

But without some further and improved sort of emigration, leading to the creation and acquisition of new-world colonies, this mere creation of the English race would never, probably, have raised England to any much greater pitch of power and civilisation than she had been able to attain before she did commence an improved sort of emigration and the planting of new-world colonies--say the pitch she had attained in the Elizabethan era, when, as we gather from Macaulay's lustrous page, half the kingdom was wild moor and waste, and the wolf and wild cat still prowled the forest; when the journey from London to Scotland was fuller far of peril than the journey now from London to New Zealand; when Manchester scarce counted 6000 people, and only a few poor fishermen dried their nets at Brighton; when the most "finished" of young ladies spelt cat with two t's, and were ignorant of crochet, when the Queen herself trod upon reeds, fastened her clothes with wooden skewers, and fed the dainty "maids of honour" on beef, salt-fish, and beer.

For we have to recollect that this little island of ours, barren in soil, bleak in climate, yielding but coarse food and raiment for its people, possessed nothing indigenous which it could exchange with richer countries for articles of comfort and luxury. England had no cotton or silk;

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no gold, silver, or precious stones; no tea or coffee; no sugar, rice, or fragrant spices; no costly woods or useful gums; no healing drugs or Tyrian dyes; and no great store even of wool, flax, or timber.

But, like the bees, we went abroad for "honey;" we commenced an improved sort of emigration; we planted colonies in lands where nature had been more bountiful; sent back the raw riches of the earth, opened our coalfields, and invoked the giant "genius of steam," fashioned these raw materials into every conceivable object for man's use, comfort, and luxury, supplied ourselves, and sold the annual surplus to the world,--thus creating commerce, shipping, and manufactures, vastly improving their sister, agriculture, and raising this little Albion of ours from her poor estate of a rugged island of the German Ocean to be Queen of the Seas, and mistress of half the world.

The little band of "Pilgrim Fathers," who, on the 6th of September, 1620, set sail in the good ship "Mayflower," to seek a refuge and the right of worship in the then rugged wilderness of America, were the heroic heralds of a mighty movement, which, as by the wand of enchantment, has since changed that rugged wilderness into one of the greatest nations which the world has ever seen.

Since this period, England has been constantly throwing off her swarms, sending forth hive after hive of earnest, enlightened Christian communities. Continent and island, wilderness and jungle, forest and prairie, but a few years since the desolate haunts of the savage and of prowling and creeping things, are now alive with the busy hum of commerce, and echoing with the glad sound of the "church-going bell." On that luxuriant plain, which but a few years since revealed no trace of human kind, save the wreathing smoke from the wild man's solitary wigwam, you see flocks and herds and golden crops surrounding the busy city, teeming with "civilised life." The clear waters of that noble river, for ages undisturbed by aught save the native's frail canoe, or the wild beasts which came at nightfall to lap their drink, are now ploughed by gaudy

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steamers, and thronged by fleets of tall merchantmen and rich argosies from the most distant regions of the earth. And we are winning these new worlds of ours, planting our banners over these new and fruitful southern lands, not as in days of old, by the blighting march of armies, by fire, sword, and desolation, but by the gentle force of peace, by the prowess of the good Knight, Industry, by agriculture and commerce, by the plough and the loom; and there "is more glory to the hero in laying such foundations of a mighty State--though no trumpets resound with his victory, though no laurels may shadow his tomb--than in forcing the onward progress of his race over burning cities and hecatombs of men."

If asked, What fruits emigration has produced us--we point to our magnificent colonial empire, peopled by eight millions of our race, and stretching over an area quadruple the size of Europe--an empire won from the wilderness by emigrants and emigration, an empire which, in these its infant days, creates nearly half our trade, and employs nearly half our shipping, which consumes millions sterling per annum of our manufactures, and which supplies us with millions sterling per annum of gold, wool, timber, and a thousand articles of raw produce in return--articles necessary to the continued existence of half our manufactures, and essential to the well-being and prosperity, nay, to the actual feeding and subsistence of hundreds of thousands of our manufacturing population.

Indeed, in the year 1857, it is time that anti-emigrationists and all who scoff at emigrants and emigration should rub the scales from their eyes, widen their conceptions, and profit by such patent truths as these: that but for emigration and its fruits they might have remained the breechless heathens their ancestors were; that if by stroke of retributive justice they were shorn of all which emigration, colonies, and emigrants, have conferred on them, they might be glad to exchange places with the tattooed natives of the Tonga Isles; that it is as clearly the design of Providence that the fertile wastes of the New World

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should be fructified by the emigrant populations of the Old World, as that the sun should give light and heat; that Lord Bacon says colonisation is an heroic work; that it is the emigrant who has carried the language of Shakspeare and Milton over half the earth; that if Britain be the empire on which the sun never sets, it is to her emigrant warriors that Britain mainly owes the boast; and that emigration is an older and a nobler thing, and one productive of far grander results, than arms, arts, commerce, law, physic, or divinity.

THE SOCIAL AND ECONOMICAL BENEFITS OF EMIGRATION.--An old writer says, and John Stuart Mill repeats --that, "Colonisation is the very best affair of business in which an old overpeopled country can engage." The dictum might well blazon in gold as a guardian motto, at Westminster, and be the handwriting on the wall of every chamber of commerce in the kingdom. It is a national truism and this is another,--of all British exports, the most profitable export, is the emigrant.

In the last forty years 6,000,000 people, nearly one-fourth of our present population, have sailed from the United Kingdom to our three great emigration fields, America, Canada, and Australia. The national convulsions, the social earthquakes, which our little islands have escaped by the safe seaward flow of this, its population-larva, defy all computation. If these six millions of emigrants, and their increase four millions more, had been caged up in our narrow streets and fields, increasing a thousandfold the numbers of our destitute and our desperate, who will assert that England would now have been England, that the Guelphs would have been at St. James's, the Russells at Woburn, the Stanleys at Knowlsey, the Fundholder anywhere?

But though the great wholesale profits which emigration has thus paid us defy all computation, figures may reveal a glimpse of the retail profits which it puts in the nation's pocket. The annual emigration from the United King-

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dom now amounts to 300,000 people, 1 that is, deducting Sundays, a thousand people a day now leave our crowded shores to plant new homes in roomier lands. Two-thirds of this daily exodus are poor people: people of the order of labour. If this annual host of surplus, or possible-pauper labourers was shut up and accumulated here, we may, I think, safely assume that it would soon annually cost the public £2,000,000 a year in extra poor's rates and crime rates. The individual power of consumption and production in a poor labourer is trebled when he gets to a colony: where he buys £5 worth of our industrial productions and produces £5 worth of our industrial exports whilst he remains a possible-pauper in England, he will buy £15 worth of our industrial productions and produce £15 worth of the raw produce for our industrial exports, when he gets to the richly paid, free-living, labour-fields of a young colony.

A portion of our national emigration account current, therefore, may be stated as follows:--

Great Britain and Ireland.

Dr. to Emigration for the year 1857.

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I apprehend that any one conversant with the subject, would call this estimate of annual "Emigration Profit" a very low estimate. But looking even at these figures, recollecting that they are figures only for one year, that the emigration movement more or less has been in operation for forty years; and that after all, figures can give us only a faint idea of the real profits of emigration (inasmuch as emigration is our great national safety valve, without which our social and political institutions might not endure another decade, and the real value of such safety valve can in no wise be estimated in figures); recollecting these things, I think we may say with the old writer and with John Stuart Mill, that colonisation is a good national business; that Manchester and Birmingham will never produce the nation an export half so valuable as the emigrant; and that for the poor, the unfortunate, the struggling, the energetic, the hopeful, and the bold, among the six-and-twenty millions of us who are battling for bread in these little island coops, the highway which leads to temporal

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salvation, is the highway which leads us to the broad domains of our sea-joined empires in Australia and America, where we may plough our own freeholds, find and feel ourselves men, and slavishly call no one master.

EXCESS OF EMIGRATION.--Anti-emigrationists are fond of harping on what they term our "excess of emigration." They say that the annual exodus of 300,000 of our people is a draining of the nation's life blood. Now, doubtless, excess of emigration is a thing possible, little England wanting people would be in a worse plight than little England wanting space. But whilst we count our unemployed and our half employed, our beggars and our criminals, our bankrupt and insolvent by tens of thousands-- whilst we count our grey locust paupers, our true fruges consumere nati 2 by hundreds of thousands--whilst we see thousands of strapping young men exhibited in shops doing their sisters' work of serving tape and bobbin--whilst an advertisement in the "Times" for an accomplished governess where "as the family is serious, no salary will be given," is answered by twenty charming young ladies, each anxious to be the victim of the wretched cheat-- whilst our large towns display the spectacle of thousands rising every morning without the means of getting the morning's meal--whilst the "Song of the Shirt" remains a true song, and prostitution ramps or cowers in every street --whilst social cancers like these are patent to us all, we have good assurance that England's emigration is not overpassing those wholesome limits within which it is the certain source of national prosperity and individual well-being, just as the sun is the certain source of light and heat; good assurance that our peril is not the draining of the nation's life blood, but the presence of too much of the life blood; and that if we ceased to deplete a little by emigration, we might some day die from apoplexy, sudden and shriftless.

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WASTE LANDS AT HOME.--Messrs. Frost, Jones, and other professional "five points" gentlemen do, I think, generally assert, that there are plenty of English acres to feed every English mouth. Now, so far as this proposition embodies a physical possibility, it is unquestionably a true one: it may be a physical possibility to remove the Goodwin Sands or to bridge over the Atlantic. If our national "difficulty" were only to grow every mouthful of food in England, which the people of England consume, the "difficulty," for a period at least, might be overcome. England might be converted into a huge kitchen-garden, and forced into increased production. Old associations and rustic prejudices slowly subverted and overthrown and the whole soul of the nation bent on producing food, money and labour would soon destroy every royal chase and forest, plough up every breezy common, fence in every purple heath, and substitute trim iron hurdles for our present wasteful green lanes and hedges of wild rose and May thorn. The sewerage of cities, with cat, rat, and dog, might be converted into a kind of agricultural forcing-broth; and, as proposed in one of Mr. Mechi's inspirations, be conveyed by drain-pipe along the rail, and poured over farms in fructifying showers, such as Danae never caught. Doubtless, the food of man and pig might be wonderfully increased. And if, after such agricultural revolution and food crusade, the people, in course of time, should have again so increased as again to cry for bread, soil might be scraped up and spread on terraces, and cabbages and quartern loaves produced on our house-tops. A portion of the people, too, might become aquatic, dwelling in canal-boats, like the Chinese, and subsisting on ducks, water-rats, and other stray river waifs; we might have turnips up to our gravel walks, giant beet root at our front doors, early potatoes in the window box, an extra pig in the back kitchen, and England might hope to become one vast food and cotton manufactory--a Paradise Lost perhaps to puling poets like Wordsworth and Milton, but a

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Paradise Regained to practical men like Cobden and Mechi.

But though there are many waste acres in England, and though it may be a thing physically possible to reclaim and cultivate such acres, and to turn England into pig-styes and food-mills, yet I do not see how Messrs. Frost and Jones are to bring about such an agricultural revolution, and substitute for emigration. These waste acres have all owners, owners who say and who ought to know that such wastes wont pay for cultivation. There are tens of thousands of waste acres in the highlands of Aberdeenshire; but the only man who would accept them as a gift, if coupled with the condition of cultivating them, would be the madman. Assume even that all revolutionary difficulties of getting the waste lands of England were over, and that Mr. Ernest Jones and a band of a thousand London mechanics were organized and then turned loose to do their best on Bodmin Moor or Salisbury Plain. I know a little about the work of reclaiming even fertile wild lands: lands where nature has done everything she could, not against the cultivator, as on Scotch highlands or Cornish moors, but where she has done everything in favour of him, as in the plains and valleys of Tasmania and Zealandia. I have, I fancy, done more work with axe and mattock than Mr. Jones would bargain to do, and I would respectfully tell him in all friendliness of spirit, and in all sympathy for our working-classes (our true steel), that of the 1000 London mechanics, with whom he would colonise Bodmin Moor, all who would be found on Bodmin Moor, one year after arrival there, would be the few who were buried there.

Now, in our colonies, our sea-joined thousand and one counties in Canada, Australia, Tasmania, Zealandia, there are millions of fertile acres, crying aloud both for owners and cultivators; and if Mr. Jones and the Chartist party would truly benefit the working-classes of these kingdoms, they would ask the Government, not for Universal Suffrage, but for means of reaching these young lands, where the steady labourer invariably becomes the yeoman freeholder,

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where, too, if he be a Chartist, he will enjoy every one of the "five points," and where he will never be soured by sight of queens, princes, aristocrats, beefeaters, bailiffs or beadles.

LEGISLATIVE COHESION OF OUR HOME AND COLONIAL EMPIRE.--For the last ten years our countrymen have been emigrating from among us, to our Canadian and Australian colonies and America, at the rate of nearly one thousand persons a day. There are no signs of any probable diminution of this daily exodus; it seems likely to remain as much a part of our social system, as the daily starting of our railway trains. Probably, every fourth family in the United Kingdom can count some emigrant among its members. Six millions of our population may be personally interested in emigration by family ties; but our whole population is interested in emigration by pecuniary ties. Emigrants and colonists pay and employ nearly half our shipping, buy nearly half our entire exports, 3 and send us back gold, wool, timber, and a hundred staples to the value of many millions sterling per annum.

Emigrants and colonists are, probably, more valuable customers to our merchants and manufacturers than all foreign nations put together; whilst, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, they are also members of our very family. Enterprising members of our family who instead of remaining here a burden and a drag, blocking up our thoroughfares, jostling us down hill, struggling with us for the prizes in love, war, literature, art diplomacy, law, trade, physic, divinity, bringing us to grief and oft carrying us with them to the Insolvent Court or the pauper prison, have had the manhood to embrace the emigrant career; and leaving us their best wishes and a clearer field, have sailed away to cultivate and fructify for our mutual good our waste Kents, Devons, Perthshires and Tyrones, in Canada, Africa, Australia, Tasmania, and Zealandia.

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Why should not this portion of our community have a voice in the government of our community? Emigrants and colonists now form a constituency of eight millions of our people. Is any much larger constituency represented at Westminster?--is anymore valuable constituency represented at Westminster? Is there any portion of the British nation which deserves better of the British nation than these 8,000,000 emigrants and colonists? Are they not an interest in the State, as well entitled to parliamentary representation as the lauded interest, the manufacturing interest, the shipping interest, the mining interest, the railway interest?

Emigrants and colonists unquestionably enjoy certain representative government, they elect representatives, and set up little parliaments and municipalities, and manage their own town and parish matters much as the citizens of Bath and Bristol do. But the colonists of Canada, and New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, and the Cape Colony, and Natal, and New South Wales, and Victoria, and South Australia, and West Australia, and Tasmania, and Zealandia, are no more represented at Westminster, are no more recognised in the governmental affairs of the nation of which assuredly they are not the least important part, than Indians, Negroes, Hottentots or Kafirs!

The only reasonable argument which could ever have been raised against the policy of a mother country like England seeking to incorporate her robust colonies into her political system by summonsing colonial as well as country members to St. Stephens, would have been the argument of distance. When Canada stood three, and Australia six months off, the argument of distance might have been a substantial argument. But what is it in 1857? Our Canadian colonies are now virtually as near London as Ireland was before the Union; and hon. members even from Australia and New Zealand would now reach St. Stephen's more easily than the Knights of Cornwall or Cumberland reached the parliament of Elizabeth.

The more immediate duties of the dozen colonial

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members whom I would fain see Queen Victoria number among her 'faithful Commons,' would of course be the promoting and the watching over of our vast emigration and colonial interests. But it would, I think, be unfair to say that such members of the House would not take a lively interest in the general policy of the State. Great British questions of war, commerce, or finance, even now interest colonists, cut off too as they are from all participation in such questions. 4 Indeed, it appears to me that the presence of a few colonial members in St. Stephen's might be attended with considerable advantage to the general legislation of the House of Commons. Their whole training, sympathies, and antecedents would make them sworn foes to red tape and routine; and their practical "go-and-do" education would enable them to bring to the discussion of any subject, an amount of robust good sense, and prompt directness which would, I fancy, have been beneficially felt in such a question as the conduct of the Russian war. 5

England's twelve great colonies and emigration fields are her twelve immense sea-joined Yorkshires, lying virtually at her doors; and if she treated them as such, and incorporated them into her social and political system, she might not, some years hence, be a little island in the north sea with 25,000,000 people; but an united empire larger than Europe with 50,000,000 of people. When American emigrants colonise a new territory, they ask admission in the parent Union; and the parent Union, wiser

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than the mother country, receives the new State into her bosom, and thus star by star, adds to the lustre of that noble flag which even now rivals the red cross, and shadows the tri-colour.

To colonists it seems that British statesmen of the year 1857 would do well to awake to the fact that Europe is no longer the world, that news of pacifications of a little "pot soon hot" like Neufchatel, and of elephant treaties with the potentate of Siam, might, perhaps, make way in a Queen's Speech for a word or two about a place called Canada, and another place called Australia; and that young powers are shooting up in our empire which if not soon joined to the empire in something more than name may end by seeking separation from the empire to the emperilment or enfeeblement both of the parent and the progeny. We lost thirteen colonies once before--let us mind that we don't lose twelve more.

Mr. Gladstone wants a good cause just now. Let him take up the cause of national emigration and the legislative cohesion of our home and colonial empire; let him look to emigrants and colonists, and seek to add twelve colonial kingdoms to the Crown. 6

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STATE EMIGRATION. -- The vast political, social and pecuniary benefits conferred on this country by the golden stream of emigration, might well demand that we should attempt both to increase the volume of the stream and to improve its course. Putting aside those great political and social advantages which we have glanced at, and viewing emigration here, simply as a means of annually putting so many additional pounds into our pockets, we may, I think, most reasonably assert that a judicious system of "State Emigration," might in a very few years be made to relieve us of at least one-half of our entire poor-rates, and of one-half of our entire crime rates; 7 and further that it would thus convert tens of thousands of our incipient paupers and criminals, our unproductive and dangerous classes, into substantial Australian and Canadian colonists, who would materially increase our supplies of gold, wool, corn, timber, and manufacturing raw produce, and who would require and become cash customers for a great additional quantity of our export manufactures. To require us to demonstrate this assertion by nice and subtle argument, would be to require us to demonstrate the existence of the sun by telescopic observation. The assertion rests on the great patent facts, that three in four of our poor, and semi-destitute, those who are driven to become our criminals and our paupers would eagerly emigrate if they could--that the State cost of helping them to emigrate, of getting rid of them once and for ever, would not amount to the one year's cost of shutting them up here as costly unproductive felons and paupers--that a century's experience of emigration proves that nine working men in ten who get to a

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colony do become prosperous colonists, do produce an immense quantity of raw staples necessary to the flourishing existence of our trade and manufactures; and do become cash customers for an immense quantity of our goods from Manchester, Glasgow, Paisley, Sheffield, Birmingham, Bradford, and Belfast.

The spectacle of our Christmas doles and alms-giving and soup-kitchens, and blacking brigades, and model prisons, and penitentiaries and pauper palaces, might well make angels weep to see so much human philanthropy marred by so much human folly.

Doubtless, the rude associations of savage tribes and the polity of civilised nations from the earliest dawn of history down to the present day, have exhibited blunders of judgment and whimsical caprices of legislation, at which we smile with pity or contempt; but since the world began there has been neither savage tribe nor civilised community which in the conduct of its public affairs has exhibited half the amount of suicidal doltishness which we exhibit year after year in spending our millions on paupers and prisoners, instead of our thousands on emigrants and emigrant ships. Spending ten millions, or any sum, every year and for ever in the maintenance and relief of a million of paupers, possible paupers, and petty criminals, is, as regards any pecuniary return which such outlay makes us, almost as barren an operation as if the ten millions were every year sunk in the Atlantic. But spending ten millions one year in removing these hands and mouths to our broad counties in Canada or Australia or Zealandia, would be like the fruitful operation of once sowing a fertile field with seed, and ever after reaping a goodly annual crop. 8

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I apprehend that the only reason we could advance in justification of our thief-and-pauper preservation, and anti-emigration policy would be this--that if we adopted any State system of emigration, some of our working men would go, and our manufacturing and employing classes would have to pay those who remained higher wages. Doubtless one result of a wholesale system of emigration would be the full employment and better pay of those sons of toil who did not emigrate; and manufacturers and employers would, unquestionably, have to pay higher wages. But manufacturers and employers are not the only orders of the community; and if they were, the plea of a rise in the price of labour would be a most worthless plea to urge against emigration; for where increased emigration took one pound out of the employer's pocket in higher wages, it would put two in, in saving him a large portion of his crime and pauper taxes, in increasing the general prosperity and contentment of the community, and in materially increasing both our colonial export, and our colonial import trade. In truth, the argument that it is sound policy to continue paying some millions a year in charity-taxes, crime-taxes and pauper-taxes, for the maintenance of a portion of our poor and destitute only in order that when we want to employ one of these poor and destitute we may hire him for 2s. a day instead of 3s., would be an argument so repulsive to common sense, and so opposite to the first principles of political economy and common humanity,

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that it is difficult to imagine any one seriously urging it in 1857 as an argument against emigration.

Another spurious argument which might perhaps be urged against increased emigration is this--that it would reduce our population, and that our population is none too large. Now, passing over the question of whether nearly 30,000,000 of people in these little islands is, or is not, too large a population for these little islands to support, we may, I think, reasonably argue that an increase of emigration would not lead to a decrease of population. An increase of emigration would be attended with an increase of national prosperity and individual well-doing; there would be less crowding and rivalry and competition in all the walks of life; there would be an increased export and import trade, and a decreased taxation; profits would bo high, wages high, employment plentiful; the agricultural interest, the shipping interest, the commercial interest, the manufacturing interest, would all be flourishing; and under these circumstances the matrimonial interest would unquestionably be flourishing, and pay perhaps even double profits. A large portion of the male millions of the United Kingdom do not take wives because, as they avow, the times are not good enough to allow them to indulge in expensive luxuries; and the production of children in this country is by no means commensurate with our intrinsic manufacturing power of producing children.

The Registrar shows us that marriages increase in seasons of national prosperity; a good system of emigration would permanently increase the national prosperity; it would, therefore, increase the number of marriages, increase the number of children; and as under a good system of emigration and colonisation, emigration and colonies would offer a career for millions of the unborn, and remove all "restrictive fears" as to what is to become of the children, we might reasonably say, that not only would emigration increase the number of marriages, but that it would also increase the produce of marriages; and that thus the steady annual emigration of a larger number of our people to our

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colonies, would result not in the decrease, but in the increase of our home population.

In truth, however, the aim of those who would establish a State system of emigration is not so much to increase emigration as to improve the direction of its course. Of the thousand people who daily leave us, only some 400 go to our colonies, the 600 go to the United States. In the last ten years, whilst 2,000,000 of our surplus population have gone to the United States, fewer than 1,000,000 have gone to our various colonies. Now even in a commercial pecuniary point of view this is a fact to be deplored. English colonists, especially English Australian colonists, consume British manufactures to quadruple the amount consumed by American citizens; and if the whole of these 3,000,000 of our countrymen had gone to Canada and Australia, and Africa and Zealandia, instead of two-thirds of them going to a foreign country, we should have had customers for some millions of pounds more of our manufactures, and should probably have been able to import double quantities of gold, wool, and raw produce for our manufactures. But the commercial loss, though heavy, is not the greatest loss. We lose our customers, but what is worse, we lose countrymen. The most valuable article which ever leaves our shores--the emigrant--goes by thousands, goes by tens of thousands, goes by hundreds of thousands, to increase the wealth and strength of a rival power. State-system emigrationists say that, these tens and hundreds of thousands of our countrymen should go to people our own counties in Canada, Australia, Africa, and Zealandia, and that under a sound State system of emigration they would go thither, and increase our national wealth and strength.

Believing, then, that the policy of removing our surplus poor to our own broad colonies would be a good policy-- believing that it is the empty belly, not the wicked heart, which annually makes criminals of thousands of our semi-destitute countrymen--believing that it would be a cheaper, wiser, more humane policy to assist our thousands of young

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destitute to a colony as emigrants, than to nurse them up here as costly paupers until blossomed into felons we have to transport them as convicts--believing that the great panacea for half the social evils which disgrace our nation, would be a sound State system of poor man emigration, I would now offer a few remarks on what I conceive to be the equitable principle of the apportionment of the cost of carrying out such State system.

When a working man removes from our mother country to one of our colonies, the good effected is a tripartite good. The mother country is benefited, the working man is benefited, the colony is benefited; and, virtually, each is benefited in about an equal degree. In practical equity, therefore, the cost of the removal should be a tripartite cost--the mother country should pay a third, the colony should pay a third, and the labourer (a year or so after he became a colonist) should pay a third. This would not only be the most equitable division of the cost; it would, I think, be a division to which each of the contracting parties would willingly assent. The mother country at the cost of from £4 to £8 per head (as the emigrant might elect to go to our near or more distant colonies), would transplant one of her oak sapling thinnings to the rich soil and free space of Canada or Australia; the colonies, at least the Australian colonies, which now bear the whole cost of bringing over the working man, would of course gladly assent to pay only one-third instead of the whole; and we know that the working man would jump at the offer of being conveyed with his family to Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, on condition that he should repay a third of his passage-money to a young land wherein he would soon become the yeoman freeholder.

Adopting this as the great pecuniary principle of that State system of emigration and colonisation which I would fain see our Legislature adopt, it is not necessary here to discuss, either the minor features of the system, or the details of that simple working practice under which the system would be the most effectively carried out. I would,

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however, remark that I would make it elective with the working man as to which colony he would go to; and that as the mother country and the colony would bear an equal share of the expense of the removal of the emigrant, they should each alike have an equal share in the selection of the emigrant. Though the Australian colonies have hitherto paid the entire cost of transplanting the labouring emigrant, and have therefore gained and exercised what we may term the commercial right of demanding the best article for their money, it has always seemed to me, colonist as I am, that Australia has displayed considerable impudence in coming here, picking and culling our poor people like cattle in a fair. No doubt, young married couples who can plough and sow and reap and mow; and brawny smiths, masons and carpenters, whom no day tires, and whom the pot-house never sees, would be preferred in the colony; but, it so happens, that these are the very people who are preferred in the mother country. The truth is, that in the immense unpeopled wastes of Canada and Australia and Zealandia, the human being is so valuable an article, that provided he were not a confirmed sot, the poorest creature that ever stepped in the shape of a "worker," would be an acquisition there; and though the colonies are entitled to some of our good stuff, they are not entitled to demand all our first quality articles, and to refuse all our "seconds;" and when John Bull's sons, New South Wales, and Victoria, and South Australia, come to our labour market with their "This woman won't suit, that man we don't like, this girl is too young, that man is too old, this person is Irish, that person can't plough, this person is not five feet ten, that person has red hair," &c, &c, I for one feel that John Bull's sons would be considerably benefited by the administration of a good paternal kicking. In the selection of State-emigration emigrants, therefore, I would have the mother country nominate one, 9 and the colonies nominate another,

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so that the plums of the pudding might be fairly apportioned.

Asserting, then, that an organized State system of emigration founded on the "tripartite cost" principle, and the fair selection of emigrants, would be signally beneficial to the nation, I would suggest the following heads of a plan for getting up that popular agitation on the question which might stimulate the Legislature to consider, and then to create such system.

1. Let there be formed in London a committee of working men, colonists, clergymen, members of parliament, merchants, and other interested parties, to be called the Committee of the Emigration League.

2. Let such Committee draw up a circular briefly stating the views and objects of the Emigration League; and let the motto of such circular be "Emigrants and Colonies not Paupers and Prisons." And then let the Committee draw up a short petition to both Houses of Parliament, praying the Legislature to take the necessary steps with the Colonial Legislatures to create an organized State system of emigration and colonisation formed on the principle of tripartite cost and the fair selection of emigrants.

3. Let them send copy of such circular and copy of such

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petition to the Mayor, and to one clergyman, and to one Dissenting minister in every town in the United Kingdom.

4. Let them request some popular resident--if possible some leading working man--in every such town to call a public meeting to advertise such petition, to procure signatures, and to enrol members of the League.

5. Let such signed petitions be returned to the Committee, and then presented to both Houses of Parliament.

If the Committee managed well, they might, I think by this plan, procure a million of signatures, and that too at an expense of not more than £100. Mr. Gladstone would be the man of men to present the monster roll in the Lower House; whilst Earl Grey would, I think, feel proud to present it in the Peers; and thus before 1860, the British empire might have established a State Emigration System, perhaps as valuable to her as Magna Charta, Trial by Jury, Representative Government, or Free Press.

NATURAL CAUSE OF THE GOOD OF EMIGRATION.-- The natural, or political-economical cause and reason why emigration is generally beneficial to a man is simply this:--industrial combination of one artificial and one natural element, that is capital and labour, operating on soil and the productions of soil produce the wealth of old countries; but in old densely-peopled countries like England, there are so many millions of people struggling to share in and divide this wealth, that very many of them get very little of it; and many, trampled down in the crowd, get none at all. Now, capital and labour operating on soil, produce the wealth of new countries; and, though, here, there is far less of the artificial element of wealth, "capital and labour," there is far more of the natural element, "soil," and the virgin soil is richer in unrifled treasures; thus the wealth produced in a new virgin country is, relatively, much greater than the wealth produced in an old used country, and there are so few people to share in and divide the wealth that each person secures a fair portion of it.

We may illustrate this reasoning by a figure. In old-

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country streams, millions of eager fishermen crowd the banks, hundreds with costly tackle in preserved waters get a salmon, thousands draw out the poor piscine prize of roach or dace, tens of thousands catch but gudgeon and sticklebacks, many catch only colds and rheumatics, and not a few of the weaklings get pushed into the mudded waters where they sink to fish no more. Now the streams of new countries are fuller of fish than the streams of old countries, and there are so few fishermen to fish them and exhaust their finny treasures, that every emigrant fisherman, armed with proper tackle, may step to the bank with his jacket off and make sure, not perhaps of regal salmon, but of goodly grilse or trout.

In old-world lotteries of life, there is one gigantic prize to innumerable blanks; in new-world lotteries of life there may be no gigantic prize, but there are innumerable goodly prizes and scarcely any blanks.

THE MODE IN WHICH EMIGRATION IS PECUNIARILY BENEFICIAL. -- However beneficial emigration may be, some misconception frequently exists as to the way in which it is beneficial. It is not so much that emigration offers us higher profits, as that it opens to us many more profitable pursuits. £2000 worked in a profitable business in England, might pay. almost as good a percentage as £2000 worked in a profitable business in New Zealand. But where there is one pursuit in which such sum could be profitably worked in the former, there are fifty in the latter country. In rich, "surplus-capital-accumulated" countries like England, the various pursuits of the community are conducted on a wholesale, large-capital, monopolising scale; and in the competition for business, the large capitalist beats down, drives off, or destroys, the small capitalist. Almost all our industrial pursuits here are conducted on such a large scale, the effective working and management of them is so costly, the various public and private charges to which they are subject are so heavy, that a great number of the common businesses of life

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cannot be entered into successfully by great numbers of the people: they either do not attempt these businesses, when their little capitals lie barren at £4 and £5 per cent, and they themselves remain idlers, clerks, assistants, dependents, &c.; or they do attempt them, and fail. No man, here, possessed of a thousand or few hundred pounds, could buy land and farm his freehold; or rent, stock, and carry on any good farm, mill, brewery, manufactory, or shop. But if with such a sum, some man, more sanguine and simple than his neighbours, did venture into some business of a commercial nature, he would probably find that, wherever he might make his start, there was some old-established large-capital rival in possession of the field, who would under-buy and under-sell him, out-puff, out-advertise, and out-credit him; a rival or rivals against whom he might maintain a gallant, but anxious struggle for a few months or for a few years, but before whom he would at last retreat with the loss of part, perhaps of all, the little capital he had been fighting with. He rashly ventured into the battle with half a weapon and no armour, and he leaves the field sorely mauled and smitten.

Now in New Zealand and in all good young colonies, there are no large capitalists to swallow small ones; all industrial pursuits are conducted on a smaller, more primitive, less costly, scale, and every man may start as master, and find a business to suit his means.

CAPITALIZATION OF PROFITS.--Emigration to a young colony, too, enables a man to save more out of his profits than he can save in an old, public-burdened, high-taxed, socially-artificial, country like England. If the annual profits of a man's business, here, be £500, the various municipal and imperial taxes he has to pay, together with the expenses of that showy "keep-up-appearances" style of living which his family must maintain if they would not be slandered and sneered at by that ubiquitous social tyrant Mrs. Grundy and her sister hags, will make such a hole in his £500 that very little will be

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left of it to add to his capital, and he will accumulate slowly.

Now in New Zealand there are no taxes to pay; Mrs. Grundy is unknown there, a family lives just as well, just as comfortably there, just as their neighbours live; but all live in a more honest, simple, good-old-fashioned homely style, and a man will find that out of his annual profit of £500, he has annually a handsome sum left to add to his capital or to invest in land.

PECUNIARY BENEFITS OF EMIGRATION. -- I do not say that New Zealand emigration would not pecuniarily benefit much larger capitalists than the "few-hundreds" men. On the contrary, I believe there is no country in the world where capitals of £5000 to £10,000 could now be invested better than in New Zealand, and no country wherein so many sorts and classes of emigrants would realise their varied views and wishes. But if asked to define the most palpable pecuniary advantages which emigration offers to the majority of emigrants, I should briefly define them as being these--first, the number of industrial pursuits offered for the profitable employment of small capitals which can find no profitable employment at home, and which, therefore, lie barren at £4 and £5 per cent.--second, the higher value of money, the treble interest, the £10 and £15 per cent, instead of the £4 and £5 procurable on "passive investments," such as mortgages and discounts--third, the ability to lay by and capitalize a much larger portion of the annual profits of any pursuit than could be laid by and capitalized in England -- and fourth, the facilities existing in a young country containing millions of fertile acres purchasable for a few shillings per acre, and where agricultural and pastoral pursuits and the creation of little landed estates are permanent and profitable pursuits, for the prosperous planting out, marrying and settling of large families of sons and daughters.

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"SOCIAL AND MORAL BENEFITS OF EMIGRATION."--If we derive substantial pecuniary benefits from emigration, these pecuniary benefits are necessarily attended with many social and moral benefits. If, from a state of poverty, pecuniary dependence, or prostration, emigration raises us to comparative affluence and independence, it is clear that emigration must benefit us in many ways besides and beyond in our mere purses and pockets. For instance, it confers on us certain social rank and status arising both from the positive and relative pecuniary benefits it bestows. Brown in England, has £2000, he fears to risk his little all in any over-crowded business, so he funds it at 3 1/2 per cent., seeks some little situation, ekes out his scanty means, and just lives. He is a householder, pays Queen's taxes, has a vote, and seat in church; by law he is a citizen of the State--but what is Brown's social rank? Does not society hold him cheap and rank him as a sort of reputable pauper? Gentleman as he may be in the best sense of the word, are there not hundreds of people, worms in more brilliant skins crawling quickly through life with him within a mile of his door, who would no more visit him than they would visit dustman or rag-merchant; people, whose wives and daughters (neither fairer nor better than his own) would blush to be seen speaking to his family in the streets, or who would cross over to avoid them; people whose carriages, did they not splash him now and then, might seem to roll through a different world from his; people who have little more social sympathy, communion, and intercourse with him and his than they have with the Fejee Islanders or the savages of Central Africa?

Now wise Brown emigrates to New Zealand, he buys land, commences creating an estate of his own, which pays him an annual £25 per cent, and becomes one of the "upper ten thousand"--one with whom the highest in the land are happy to associate. Virtually, Brown drives his carriage--for he drives his carriage as much as any one else does, and the difference between nobody driving a carriage and everybody driving a carriage is a difference

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more of words than of things. Virtually, emigration has knighted Brown and Mrs. and Miss Brown are of the haute volee, and go to Court.

SETTLING FAMILIES.--Another great social and moral benefit of emigration is the provision and free space it offers for the half-dozen sons and daughters. Here, certainly, I do not speak from experience; but here, I fear, I know enough to know that full half those carking cares of life which shorten or embitter the existence of thousands of English parents, arise from the oft-put question, "What is to become of the children?" Now I venture to say that the reader shall be the confidential friend of every family in New Zealand, and never hear this question even alluded to, that is, alluded to in any anxious or desponding sense. And this arises simply from the fact that men and women, or the materials for men and women, children, are the most valuable possessions which a young and fertile country like New Zealand can possess. Her rich virgin soil, the unrifled treasures of her broad domains, need but the magic contact of population, the magic touch of human industry, to endow and to enrich millions. New Zealand is a larger and by nature a much richer country than Great Britain--her population is less than that of many an English town! She presents an area of nearly 2000 acres to every man, woman, and child at present in the country -- acres purchasable for the most part at a few shillings per acre, and capable of annually producing many pounds per acre. The 80,000,000 of wild acres in New Zealand cry for people; the young agriculture, the young commerce, all the young careers and institutions of the new land cry for people; and it is true to say that in Zealandia, children are like arrows in the hands of the strong man, and that happy is the emigrant who has his quiver full.

The reader may have seen a curious but sanguine little book with the arresting title of "How to grow Rich?" Should the ingenious author ever extend his pages to New Zealand, his first maxim should be "Marry and multiply."

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RURAL LIFE.--Another social advantage of emigration is, that it enables us to escape from the rabble roar and rout of towns, to escape the moral and physical filth and pollutions which may contaminate and must disgust all who are "in populous city pent;" and to gratify that longing for a freehold of our own and a country life which seems to be one of the most common and most wholesome desires of our nature.

An eloquent writer, speaking of rural life in a colony, says:--

"There the necessities of present life, the every-day calls upon our industry and action, the constantly-shifting scene of labour and activity, the rural cares which become comforts, bid us live out of ourselves in the world of external realities. There our friends are not our rivals, nor our neighbours our competitors. The sight of 'the human face divine' sickens us not with a sea of the squalid visages of multitudinous population, but brightens our own countenance with welcome to a brother. The mind has no time to canker within itself; we have to grapple with the palpable realities of the physical elements and the earth that is around us, not to wrestle with the diseased anxieties of the brooding mind. The nervous energy which in populous city life festers in the brain, and eats into the heart, is exhausted in the healthful activity of muscular exertion. The steers have to be yoked, the heifers low for milking, the now-fallen lambs bleat their accession to our flock. The maple yields its sugar, the sheep its fleece, the fruit hangs for our gathering. There is no exciseman to forbid our brewing our own October, or making our own soap and candles. With the day's work, the day's cares are over; the soul broods not, but sleeps. Tired nature bids us take no thought for tomorrow, for we have the promise that seed-time and harvest shall never fail; our house and our land are our own, and we have fuel for the felling. Children become a blessing and helpers

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to us. Nature is within, and above, and around us. 'Behold the lilies how they grow, they toil not, neither do they spin, yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' If, then, the splendours of a royal court are as nothing to those natural glories which God, in the fields, by the rivers, and on the mountain side, has made accessible to the meanest and poorest of us, and which we may drink in at every sense, what is there in the crowded city, or the populous centre of wealth and civilization, that we should really prefer to the enamelled prairie, the echoing forest, the contemplative waterfall, or the fertile valley? What are not the thousand moral temptations and spiritual hazards to which a family of sons is exposed in the gay vice, the unthinking extravagance, the reckless dissipation of European cities? How many prosperous parents have their whole happiness poisoned by the misconduct or spendthrift thoughtlessness of pleasure-hunting boys; whose hearts, perhaps in the right place, and whose principles, sound and true at bottom, have their heads and fancy turned and captivated by the follies of the hour, and the 'pleasant sins' of metropolitan gaiety. In the Bush, on the prairie, on the colonial farm, if the attraction be less, the safety is the greater. The hot blood of youth sobers down in the gallop over the plain, or falls to its healthy temperature as he fells the forest king.

"Where all women are reverenced, and respect themselves, the gay bachelor can fix his regards only where he is ready to repose his prospect of happiness for life. Where vice presents no artificial gilding, and debt and dissipation are equally despised, there is small temptation to improvident extravagance; and no inducement to leave the well-paid path of cheerful industry."

LESS CARE AND TOIL.--Another great social advantage of emigration is, that it frees many of us from a life of toil, entails less work--sometimes more work of hands, but infinitely less work of mind--less care, less anxiety, less of ceaseless attention to business. Here, many a man's career on earth is little other than one long life race with millions of eager rivals picking up £ s. d. strewn scantily along the course. Slave of the lamp "till tired he sleeps and life's poor play is o'er," he toils

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through his days at a money mill, crushing specks of gold from tons of quartz. His bow is ever bent; his book of life, the cash book; his creed, work that ye don't starve, six days must thou labour and do hard work, and the seventh count thy gains. Existence has rolled by before he has thought of happiness; the faculty of enjoyment has passed away before he has leisure to enjoy; life is lost in the struggle to live. Forty years and a day has he sought the idol gold, and missed it--or found it, looked on it, and died.

If inquests were held here on every man who died an unnatural death, how many verdicts would run, "Killed by care!"

RETRENCHMENT AND REFORM.--Emigration, too, enables us to do what we cannot do here--take in sail, brace up, retrench, and reform. Oracular people who having drawn a prize in the lottery of life think that there are no blanks, are fond of remarking that if we would work as hard and spend as little in the old land as we shall in the new, we might do as well in the old land as in the new. As to "working," I venture to reverse the proposition, to say that half the work, half the toil of mind and body, half the expenditure of the vital principle, which we must put forth in the old land, an we would not starve, would produce us treble the old-land return if put forth in the new. As to the "spending," they are right--doubtless if we had wings we could fly, but we have no wings. Such is the paradoxical character of our social system, such the tyranny of our priests and idols, that often we cannot lower sail and retrench. We must sail with the tide and do as others do, in order that we may not do worse than others do; we must spend an income in order that we may get an income. The yearly expenditure of many a family should be added up in three columns--rent and taxes, expenses of living, expenses of "keeping up appearances." We spend £300 a year for our own demands, and £300 a year for the

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demands of society. Society travels first class, and demands gold lace, spangles, plumes, and a flunkey. If Brown having spent £300 a year for society for some years refuse to do so any longer--if he retrench, sell the brougham, saddle his own horse, dig his own acre, dine at two, put Mrs. B. in the kitchen for an hour or two, and Miss Lucy in the dairy, what would trade, society, and the Hon. Deuceace often say and do to Brown? Say that Brown had fallen from his high estate--that Brown was no longer to be trusted--that Brown was going down hill to Coventry very fast--and they would lend him a farewell kick to accelerate his progress thither. Strange to say, no one points to Brown as a model of economy, every one points at him as a beacon of extravagance, and the social rats leave what seems a sinking ship.

But let Brown carry out this "retrenchment, and reform in New Zealand, and what would society and the Hon. Deuceace say to him there?--say, "Welcome, brother, you come to do what we came to do, and are all the better for having done, and here's a hand to help you on."

QUALIFICATIONS AND QUALIFYING FOR EMIGRATION. -- If asked to name the two most "money-making" qualities an emigrant could possess, or all the qualities he need possess save common honesty and industry, I should say, sober pluck and patience. It is not so much the dashing, clever, brilliant man, as the brave, stedfast, and hopeful man who climbs quickest in a colony. Great talents are good in a colony, and great talents go to a colony; but they are not relatively so useful to a man as they are in England. All the industrial occupations and pursuits of the young land are conducted in so simple, so primitive, a manner, that any man may conduct them with success. In the professions, in commercial pursuits, in all the common business of life in England, any man, however clever, competent, and persevering he may be, may have some rival who has had the tact to make clients and customers believe that

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he is more clever, competent, and persevering, and who thus carries off the loaves and fishes. But there are few or no pursuits in the broad fields of a young colony where a man will lose ground because of the presence of any better man than himself; and though fools don't emigrate because they have not sense enough, fools, steady fools, unquestionably might emigrate and do well.

This easiness and simplicity of all colonial pursuits renders a special training to colonial pursuits quite unnecessary. In a new country, we say any man can do anything, and that any man does do anything. That venerable aphorism of our schools, the "Ne sutor ultra crepidam," might be a golden maxim for all old-world workers--it rules none but veritable cobblers in a colony. Life in a colony is not a narrow circumscribed routine life, closely hedged in and trimly squared by tyrant form and custom. In a colony there is none of that minute microscopical subdivision of labour under which one man blows one note, and a pin passes through a hundred hands; in a colony, the development of our individual humanity is not altogether arrested by the progress of the social principle; there our claws are not pared, and each of us is something more than the revolving but stationary wheel of a machine; and there, with equal certainty and success, the soldier converts his sword into a ploughshare, the sailor steers a harrow, the merchant turns farmer, the farmer merchant, the lawyer acquires an estate by "deed of axe," not by deed of pen, the doctor, tossing "physic to the dogs," thrives better on fine wool than erst on fine ladies, and the fair Arachne of crochet may hope to become both useful and ornamental on the milking and the music stool.

Indeed, in the commonest and most profitable pursuit of all in New Zealand--the purchase of wild land and the gradual creation of a little landed estate by means of the plough and fleece--many practical colonists, so far from deeming it necessary that the emigrant should have had any home training or old-world experience of farming,

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contend that the active professional or town-bred man succeeds better, that is, makes quicker first progress, than the home bred farmer. They assert that the old world farmer, trained up to a highly artificial old-world system, a man of a class remarkable for prejudice and the slow reception of new ideas, has a great deal to unlearn when he lands in the colony, that he will lose time in clinging to many old-world fashions which are utterly unsuited to the new life in the new land. Whereas the genteel-family emigrant, the soldier, sailor, merchant, tradesman, mechanic, parson, lawyer, doctor, having nothing to unlearn, no prejudices to disgorge, their minds being the "tabula rasa," will instantly accept and adopt that simple new-world practice which they see so successful on the estates of their neighbours. However, be this as it may, there can be no question that in this, one of the chief pursuits of New Zealand emigrants, a man who had never seen a plough does, as the rule, succeed just as well as the man brought up to the plough tail.

This simplicity of the personal qualifications for emigration does away with the necessity for personally qualifying. A bachelor emigrant, or a son going out as pioneer for his family, leaning to pastoral pursuits, and deeming it prudent to get a little experience before commencing for himself, will occasionally go to Cumberland, or some hill sheep country, and take a year with a sheep farmer. He would do far better to sail at once, master some popular shilling sheep hand-book on the voyage, and give some good colonist £100 for a year's board and a year's training in the actual pastoral pursuits of the colony itself. Again, I have known ambitious agricultural emigrants prepare themselves by taking a course of instruction at the agricultural college, or on some crack farm in Norfolk or the Lothians. A perusal of the "Book of the Farm" on the voyage, and the use of their eyes and ears for a month in the colony, would have qualified them better. They have learnt Liebig, agricultural chemistry, and the scientific classification and nomenclature of soils; and, doubtless,

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with a good balance at the bankers, could create another Tiptree from another waste, and force up sixty bushels an acre, at a cost of 11s. 6 3/4d. per bushel. But, in New Zealand, nature, soil, and climate are Mechi and Liebig, and half the costly college lore is worse than useless.

Emigration works are extant, too, wherein the author, determined that his hero shall be well armed for the fight, counsels him to go with anvil saw and adze, lathe last and goose; to be at once smith carpenter and cooper, turner cobbler and tailor. Now I do not at all undervalue emigrant mechanical accomplishments; I worked as a carpenter for a year before I went to New Zealand, and attained so fair a mastery of the art that I flatter myself I could turn out a better sash than book; but I cannot counsel any New Zealand emigrant to make himself this Jack-of-all-trades man, this botcher of all and half master of none. In the first place, five-sixths of his mechanical lore would not be more useful to him than Hebrew; and an emigrant who devoted a month to each of the above pursuits might well make shoe that would lame a horse, door that would not shut, boot like a bucket, coat that would scare a crow, and tub that would not stand.

In short, the rule in this question of qualifying should be this:--When a family has deliberately decided to go to New Zealand, and no pecuniary or private matters intervene to delay their departure, they should wait for nothing, but pack up and sail by first good ship bound to the particular port they wish to be landed at; for though the practical knowledge of certain useful arts which they might acquire by waiting six months would be valuable to them, it would not generally be so valuable to them as the time and money they would exhaust in acquiring it. But when owing to private affairs, a family cannot get away for a few months, father and son might take a week at ploughing and learn the easiness of holding and setting a plough, and then buy the tools (page 355), turn an outhouse into a shop, and get some handy journeyman carpenter to

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come for an hour or two in the evening or day to teach them the use of saw and plane, and help them to make good packing-cases, the outfit cabin drawers, an oak tool chest, one or two loose (not put together) wheel-barrows, and half a dozen doors and windows for the new house. If there be another son he might pay £5 or £10 for two or three months with some intelligent smith, turner, wheelwright, or cabinet-maker, as his taste might dictate; and Mrs. Brown and Lucy might ask some little farmer's wife to give them a lesson or two in dairy work, ham and bacon curing, &c. Indeed, where the various members of the family were heartily willing, or anxious to do this, and when circumstances were favourable to doing it, the varied knowledge they would thus acquire would be so pleasant and profitable to them, that I think it might sometimes be worth while even waiting two or three months in order to acquire it.

There is one sort of "qualifying," though, to which I would earnestly call the attention of the Bachelor Brotherhood. A colonial proverb runs, "Single men may succeed, married men must;" and any single gentleman, having a little money, and emigrating to get a little more, should stop a week, uncord the box, take out the red waistcoat, ride round the neighbourhood, simplex munditiis, Coelebs in search of a wife, and seek to add to his outfit something far prettier and more fruitful than patent plough, thrashing mill, or thorough-bred. If long a Benedick, and jokers' joke, let him say with Beatrice's bargain, When I swore to die a Bachelor I never thought to have lived to--emigrate; and if he draw a prize (and ladies say there are no blanks) he will find the New Zealand valley a golden spot, where he may exclaim, "Hic ipso tecum consumere aevo" -- which, for the edification of maidens who have lost their Latin, we may freely translate into "Here, with thee and a ripe cigar, I could wear away even life itself."

EVILS OF EMIGRATION DELAY. -- One of the most

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fatal errors of emigrants is the error of delay. Thousands, sensible of the advantages of emigration, linger on from year to year, sink from bad to worse, and then when they have nothing left to emigrate with, emigrate as a last resource.

Now we cannot expect, and assuredly do not desire, that those who are in what they regard as safe and prosperous circumstances, should be induced to emigrate, and thus depart from the safe old maxim of "leaving well alone." But how often do those who have been going down hill for years, and who have long looked to emigration, still go on losing time and money, clinging to ruin, hoping against hope for better times, still go on feebly fighting a losing fight, still go on shivering on the brink delaying to plunge and swim to what they know to be a safer shore, until when they do go, they reach the new land in that forlornest of forlorn estates--paupers in purse and not paupers in habits and hands.

A little capital will go a long way in New Zealand, and well handled will do a great deal; but some capital is absolutely necessary, and there is such a thing as going with too little. Half the discomforts and "roughings," the disheartening difficulties, the early struggles, the slow laborious first progress of many an emigrant, do not arise because such things are inseparable from emigration, but because many an emigrant has delayed his emigration until he has landed all but bankrupt in purse. And if the reader knew as much on this point as I know, his wonder would not be that an emigrant sometimes fails to climb the hill, but that half as many climb the hill and succeed as do climb the hill and succeed. When a middle-class family of the common character and constitution has lingered on here until they have lost all but their passage money, they had better remain here, their emigration day is past. Here, I am aware I differ in opinion from many colonists, but such is my opinion, and I frankly avow it.

It is no exaggeration to say that a qualified family landing in New Zealand with their £1000 in 1857,

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might place themselves in easy and independent circumstances by 1862; the same family emigrating in 1862, with half this capital, might not attain an equal position by 1870. And this rate of progress would apply more or less to any amount of capital: a family going at once with £500, might attain a position in a few years which, if they lingered on here until they had lost half this little capital, they might not attain for many years, or might not attain at all.

It is obviously impossible to name that particular era or turning point when it becomes more prudent for us to go than to stay, but as a general rule, we may certainly say that when our affairs have reached such point in the downward state that emigration has once suggested itself, the sooner we then emigrate the better.