1857 - Hursthouse, C. New Zealand, or Zealandia, the Britain of the South [Vol.II.] - CHAPTER XX. EMIGRANTS, FIT AND UNFIT.

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CHAPTER XX.

I SHALL now ask the reader to consider a few remarks on three descriptions of people to whom emigration more or less relates, namely: 1st, those who emigrate, but who do not emigrate to the best place; 2nd, those who emigrate, but who would do better to stay at home; and 3rd, those who would like to emigrate, and who would emigrate successfully, but who do not emigrate.

THOSE WHO EMIGRATE, BUT WHO DO NOT EMIGRATE TO THE BEST PLACE.--Nothing is further from my intention than to attempt to depreciate the national merits and importance of such countries as the United States, the Canadas, and our North-American possessions. I have been there, and I have friends and relatives settled there. America is unquestionably a fine country for Americans; whilst Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, are colonies of which any nation might be proud.

But, except for Continental adventurers, German mechanics, Irish labourers, paupers, and the pinched and hungry who emigrate chiefly to get full belly and plenty to eat, these countries are not, I think, now the best emigration fields, and emigrating thither in 1857 is somewhat an emigration blunder and mistake.

Twenty years ago emigrants had no choice of emigration fields: they either starved in Europe, or they went to America. The Cape was a mere sanatorium for Indian invalids, the blight of convictism was on New South Wales and Van Dieman's Land, South Australia was a paper scheme, Victoria and the gold-fields did not exist,

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New Zealand was unborn. All this is altered; a new creation of emigration fields has sprung up, the diggings have bridged the ocean, and half a dozen magnificent southern colonies are now brought nearer to us than Canada was to Scotland twenty years ago.

The principal reasons which long weighed with people in emigrating to America were three--shortness of voyage, cheapness of land, popular government. A little consideration will I think show us that if these ever were good and sufficient reasons for those whom we may term our capitalist emigrants, they are good and sufficient reasons no longer.

VOYAGE.--All the most disagreeable part of emigration, the breaking up one's home, the adieu to friends, the getting off, the "settling down" to sea life (page 500), comes to us just the same, whether we emigrate to Victoria or Canada, or New Zealand or Nova Scotia, or Australia or Illinois. As to the tediousness of the longer voyage, thousands of people go to Australia who tell you they enjoyed the voyage; but admit that the voyage is tedious--and what then? It only comes once. Emigration is not a yacht trip to Brighton; and he or she who would not emigrate to Australia through fear of "ennui" on the voyage, may rest assured that they are not fit to emigrate at all.

As to "safety," the voyage to Australia and New Zealand, both as to freedom from shipwreck and from disease, is unquestionably safer than the voyage to America. 1 As to "expense," recollecting that the New Zealand emigrant and his family and his goods and baggage are

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actually landed by the London ship within probably ten miles of the spot where he will plant his home, and build his house, I am very much inclined to think that any good emigrant family now going to New Zealand would reach the actual scene of their operations at almost as little expense, and unquestionably with less trouble, than they would if they went to any of the western North-American settling grounds, perchance two thousand miles distant from the port where the ship would land and leave them. Whilst even if it did cost a few pounds more to get to Australia or New Zealand than to Canada-West, Michigan, or Kansas, this should be a very trivial and secondary consideration; for our object in emigrating is not to go to the cheapest-reached place, but to go to the best place. It may cost me a pound to get from London to Liverpool, two pounds to get from London to Plymouth; but if I can earn £300 a year in Plymouth, and £200 a year in Liverpool, surely I am a fool if I don't go to Plymouth.

CHEAP LAND. -- Probably the finest agricultural wild land in the world may now be bought in New Zealand at from 10s. to 20s. an acre; and some inferior, but good, at 5s. an acre. Land which considering its proximity to good markets and water carriage, the ease with which it may be cleared and ever after cultivated, its intrinsic richness, and the extraordinary agricultural climate it lies in, is cheaper, probably five hundred per cent, cheaper, to buy, live on, and cultivate, than any wild land in any part of the United States of North America. Our North-American territories, it must be recollected, are not great open, grassy, pastoral, wool-growing, corn-growing, gold and ore producing countries like our Australian and New Zealand colonies, but chiefly dense, forest-choked, semi-agricultural countries, where rude plenty is wrung from the soil, tree by tree, by the hard labour of the axe. The soil, when got at, is often rich; but, as the chief implements of the North-American farmer are necessarily

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the axe, saw, and hoe, as the cruel winters necessitate the housing and artificial feeding of ail farm stock, North-American emigrant farming is proverbially a rough laborious emphatically slow pursuit, realising plenty for the mouth, hoe-cakes, pork, and pumpkin-pie, in abundance; but putting little in the pocket; and the wild forest acres which North America offers us at 10s., 8s., or 2s. 6d. an acre, would I fear be somewhat dear even as a gift. 2

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POPULAR GOVERNMENT. -- Any emigrant who leaves England to seek "freedom" in the United States, should lead with him that silly dog who lost his meat in the water in trying to seize the shadow; and should be ever ready to act on the advice given to the immortal Pickwick, "always to shout with the crowd;" for the chief difference between the ruling power in America, the mob, and an eastern despot, is, that the one legislates with the rifle and the cowhide, the other, with the bowstring and the bastinado.

Every £50 freeholder and £5 householder can now vote for, or be, a Member of Parliament in New Zealand; and there is certainly no country in America, perhaps none in the world, where the people govern themselves so fully and so well.

I repeat, therefore, that the reasons which formerly induced the capitalist emigrant to choose the American emigration fields, if they ever were good and sufficient reasons, are so no longer. Emigrant families may now get to Australia, Tasmania, and Zealandia, with as much ease, comfort, and safety, as to Canada West, or the backwoods of the United States. Wild land is cheaper and better in New Zealand,

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climate infinitely finer, and chance of health, strength, and long life, much greater. The emigrant's progress is quicker, he accumulates faster, whilst his toil is less; his habits of life, all that he sees, hears, and does, are more home like; society is better, more English-like and polished, and there, in a loyal British colony, he is still John Bull. 3

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THOSE WHO EMIGRATE, BUT WHO WOULD DO BETTER TO STAY AT HOME.--Such a class of emigrants undoubtedly exists, but fortunately it is a small one. It is composed

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of four varieties: the Too-lates, the de Smythes, the Dismal Dummies, and the Slow-Fast gents.

The first, are the Laggards, described page 622. The second, are the fastidiously-genteel people of feeble intellect, and the silver fork and snob order; people who would prefer a crust and sour claret in the drawing-room, to roast beef and a tankard in the kitchen; people who regard the flunkey as an institution, and who, like the Oxford man, would not save you from drowning, because you had not been "introduced." Mr. and Mrs. de Smythe (small d, mind) shrivel up before the great heartiness and manly simplicity of emigration, and are as much out of place in a colony as a dancing dog in a fox hunt. 4

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What, colonially but somewhat paradoxically, are called "Dismal Dummies," or grumblers, for the genus is by no means dumb, constitute the third order of Unfit Emigrants. When wheat or wool falls, or when trade is less brisk than usual, farmers and traders grumble in New Zealand just as they do in England; indeed, a certain amount of grumbling seems essential to human felicity, and it would be a most arbitrary interference with the liberty of the subject to interdict any man from grumbling at his pleasure in New Zealand. But the Dismal Dummy, the unfit emigrant grumbler, is the man or woman who grumbles always. These unfortunates generally give the colonial community to understand that they never wished to emigrate--that they were doing well at home, and were likely to do better; and that it was their friends who over persuaded them to emigrate. A considerable portion of their daily occupation and amusement is found in abusing the colony, in denouncing their neighbours, and in bemoaning their lot. The towns are villages; the streets are unpaved; there is neither gas nor water-cart; the sun is too brilliant, the sky too blue, the trees too large, the meat too fat, the house not so large as the house they lived in when they kept three servants and visited a family who knew a baronet; and they only wish they were back. This is a wish in which colonists sincerely join; for not only are such unfortunates a grievous bore and nuisance in the little colonial community, but they really do injury to a colony by invariably writing about it in the "dismal dummy," and "sackcloth and ashes" strain.

Now the male or female "Dismal" is generally some one who has emigrated reluctantly, some one who has been a sort of pressed emigrant. I would therefore caution any lady or gentleman who is not willing to emigrate, to stay at home; they will get no sympathy in a colony, and they

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will probably come to grief; and I would further caution all friends and advisers of such lady or gentleman never to press them to emigrate, but rather to press them to bear the ills they have than fly to those they know not of.

The fourth variety of the unfit emigrant is the "slow fast" gent, the ne'er-do-well. The Town type of this variety is sketched in a sentence. He is a youth who has lived fast and gone early to seed, he is known to tailors, and has heard of County Courts, he illustrates casinos, and is loud at the Cider-cellars and the Pic, he haunts night billiard-tables with other small birds of prey, and knows a thing at cards, he is far above work, and far beneath it, and, like the lazy dog, leans against the wall to bark. One would scarcely imagine that such a "gent" would ever go to a colony-- he does not go, he is sent. When he has exhausted each miserable shift which green credulity offers to his tribe, when fairly "stumped" and tractable, his friends count him £100, ship him off to Australia, Africa, or New Zealand, and hope they are quit of him. But no, like a bad bill, he comes back, colonially noted and protested too, and at considerable expense to those who issued him.

The army, hotel-touting, billiard-marking, bus-driving, bill-sticking, street-singing, many industrial pursuits are open to a gentleman of this stamp in old-world cities; none are open to him in a young colony; and if he will be warned, he and the other three varieties of "unfit emigrants" will cling to home, and leave bad alone for fear of worse.

THOSE WHO WOULD LIKE TO EMIGRATE, AND WHO WOULD EMIGRATE SUCCESSFULLY, BUT WHO DO NOT EMIGRATE. -- It is, I think, impossible to have an extensive circle of acquaintance, and to mix freely in society in town and country, without coming in contact with many excellent people, who have every inducement to emigrate, who are well fitted to emigrate, and who would like to emigrate, but who, nevertheless, do not emigrate. They are placed

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in this paradoxical position, and restrained from emigrating, more or less, by certain bugbears which, with the reader's permission, we will briefly dissect, and which, however unsuccessfully, we will briefly attempt to dispel. 5

1. Dislike of publishing to their circle that their circumstances are such as to render emigration a prudent step; opposition of acquaintances, &c.

2. Fears that their want of certain assumed necessary qualifications incapacitates them for successful emigration.

3. Natural feelings of repugnance at leaving home and friends.

4. The strangeness and seeming uncertainty of the new future; fears of not doing well; and remoteness of the scene.

5. The assumed roughness and privations of the new life.

6. Assumed social deficiencies, absence of good society, amusements, and means of education, &c.

1. Surely this is an unreasonable scruple. If, on due consideration, a family have arrived at the conviction that emigration would be their true "elixir vitae" medicine, why not take it? Probably three-fourths of their true friends, and of those more sensible acquaintances whose opinion they ought to value, would commend their resolution. As to the rest, their fair weather visitors, morning callers, club cronies, dance partners, tea-table gossips, "id genus omne," who and what are they, with their pribbles and their prabbles, to stand between me and what I conceive to be good for me? Brush them aside with the flies. If Captain Joker, unattached, tell Adjutant Poker over their cups that that unfortunate devil Brown is off

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to cannibal New Zealand, where some day he will be devilled Brown and eaten, why not applaud Bardolph's potent joke, and promise, when tailors trouble and when billiards fail, an he will shave, live cleanly, and foreswear sack, to make the gallant man head shepherd of a station and commander of ten thousand sheep. Bent on high designs, "bound to fresh fields and triumphs new," Mrs. B. and Miss Lucy, like the lady in Comus, may pass scathless through the mowing ranks of the old women of either sex; and if their emigration impart any extra flavour to "Mrs. Grundy's" pekoe, let them remember that the "Grundy nuisance" is about to cease for ever, and not envy the wretched hag the last enjoyment they afford her.

Half the sneering opposition which we oft encounter when we talk of emigrating, proceeds from no solicitude as to our welfare--many who jeer most at us well know that if they did their duty, they would emigrate too--like us they are standing on hollow ground, but they lack the pluck to seek a firmer shore--sinking, they would have us sink too.

When clamour is rampant, then, and jests rife, let Brown whistle and pack up, and call to mind what Solomon said about braying a fool.

2. The remarks, page 617, will, I trust, tend to dispel this most unfounded fear. Any good emigrant now going to New Zealand, willing to put his shoulder to the wheel, willing to learn and to do his best, will do well enough, and will unquestionably find himself the right man in the right place.

3. NATURAL FEELINGS OF REPUGNANCE AT LEAVING HOME, FRIENDS, AND COUNTRY.--What is "home?" Is it the particular four brick walls within which we happened to be born? If so, scarcely one of us ever lives in home. Is it the particular city, town, village, hamlet, or clachan

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we happened to be born in? If so, such home is often changed by a man half a dozen times in his life; as when he moves from Connaught to Cork, or from Cornwall to Cumberland, or from Scotland to Liverpool, or from Londonderry to London. Home, I take it, is that place where, for the time being, a man sets up his house and household gods, where he has his wife and bairns and books; and if he carry these things with him, he carries his home with him, whether he migrate from Nottingham to New Zealand, or from Nottingham to Northumberland; and the Roman was right when he said, "Where I am well off, there is my country."

As to leaving friends, friends are of two sorts, dear friends and dinner friends--those who would lend us a ten-pound note, and those who would not. As to the hundred latter, they are gay agreeable people, most social butterflies who know the sunny side of the peach, who sip your wine, shawl your wife, escort your daughter, and render you and society a thousand little services. But we may leave them, and live. As to our half-dozen dear friends, if we could carry them with us, the movement would be a perfect one. Sometimes, if we try, we can carry one or two of them with us; when we cannot, we must e'en say good-bye for a bit, and see them by letter. When a man emigrates, he emigrates to secure certain substantial benefits for himself, his wife, and children-- these are his nearest and dearest friends, and these always go with him. Moreover, he will make plenty of friends in New Zealand. The very fact of his having chosen that country in preference to any other, makes him a popular man the moment he steps ashore. He is in no one's way there, he will push no one down the hill in climbing it himself, and he is received in a spirit of freemasonry by a community of his equals, who like him have left the old land to better their fortunes in the new.

As to leaving the land of our birth, "Omne solum forti patria est;" but in going to New Zealand do we, virtually, leave the land of our birth any more than when we go to

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Jersey, Scotland, or Ireland? New Zealand, rightly regarded, is an integral part of Great Britain--an immense sea-joined Devonshire. An Englishman going thither, goes among his countrymen, he has the same queen, the same laws and customs, the same language, the same schools, the same churches, the same press, the same social institutions, and, save that he is in a country where trees are evergreen, and where there is no winter, no opera, no aristocracy, no income tax, no paupers, no beggars, no cotton mills, he is, virtually, in a young England.

Neither does he in any sense become less an Englishman, or an inferior sort of Englishman. National boasts, Cressy, Poictiers, Trafalgar, Waterloo, Inkerman, Shakspeare, Milton, Newton, Pope, and Burns, belong as much to the Briton in New Zealand as to the Briton in Mid Lothian or Middlesex. The New Zealand colonist has at once all the bright recollections of the England he has left, and all the bright prospects of the England he has reached; the past glories of the old land, the dawning splendours of the new.

No degeneracy of race, no personal inferiority, attends emigration. Emigration is a career which calls up pluck, bottom, energy, enterprise, all the masculine virtues. The feeble-minded, the emasculate, the fastidious, the timid, do not emigrate; they bow their necks to the yoke, ply the distaff, and spin wealth for the great at home. It is the strong and the bold who go forth to subdue the wilderness and conquer new lands. The 50,000 colonists in New Zealand would probably comprise more men naturally fitted to rule the senate, conduct the press, dominate the seas, and "set the squadron in the tented field," than any promiscuously taken 50,000 of their countrymen in England.

4. THE STRANGENESS AND SEEMING UNCERTAINTY OF THE NEW FUTURE, FEARS OF NOT DOING WELL, AND REMOTENESS OF THE SCENE.--Strangeness, here, is novelty, and novelty is generally pleasing. There is little or nothing radically

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much stranger in emigrating, than in moving into a new house, or in dining at two instead of six, or in putting on new bonnet or boots; and nothing in it to which any sensible man or woman would not become almost as soon reconciled, accustomed, and familiar.

As to the seeming uncertainty of the new future, save death and taxes, everything is uncertain. If we could insure every New Zealand emigrant a thousand a year, New Zealand emigrants might soon have to re-emigrate to the Fejees. All we can say as to "uncertainty and fear of not doing well" is this--there is no uncertainty as to the fact that for many a year we have been doing badly here, there is every appearance of certainty that if we remain here we shall do worse here; and though every rule has its exceptions, though we may know a de Smythe, or a dismal dummy, or a too-late man, or a slow-fast gent, who has failed at emigration as at everything else, we know that for half a century emigration has saved or substantially benefited millions of old-world emigrants, and may reasonably expect that emigration will benefit us just as it has benefited the millions who have gone before us.

As to the bugbear of remoteness of scene and being out of the world, New Zealand is as much in the new world as England is in the old world. All that we value most is with us. The Australian continent, with its London-Sydney and Liverpool-Melbourne, is our Europe; whilst, if our connection with the old world be essential to our happiness, we may get the gossip of Paris and St. Petersburg in New Zealand as soon, as fifty years ago, it was got in Edinburgh or Aberdeen; may shake some friend by the hand on the 1st of May who left Southampton on the 1st of March; may sow spring wheat, visit London, and be back in time for harvest, and see Manchester and Birmingham bagmen come to New Zealand twice a year for cash and orders.

5. ASSUMED ROUGHNESS AND PRIVATIONS OF THE NEW LIFE.--This is an objection which applies far more to

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the pioneer, tent-dwelling days of new settlements, than to such later more advanced days as have now been reached in New Zealand; and far more, as observed page 622, to the too-late, capital-exhausted emigrant than to the more prudent family who go in time.

Speaking of New Zealand as it is now, but asking the reader to recollect that a greater social change and advance takes place in a young rising colony like New Zealand in five years than takes place in any old-grown country like England in five-and-twenty, I think we shall describe all the "roughness of living," domestic privations and discomforts, to which a New Zealand emigrant family would now temporarily be exposed, if we say this--they would probably not live, at first at least, in so fine or so well furnished a house as the one they had left; but it would be a house as good as their neighbour's, would be pretty and comfortable, and would be their own; and their table would be quite as well if not better supplied. They would have very much worse roads, and no public conveyances, and would have to walk and ride on horseback a great deal more; and ladies would probably have to do much more domestic work than fell to their lot in England. Help may always be had for periodical washings and cleanings and great occasions; but female servants are very scarce, and much addicted to marrying; and Mrs. B. and Miss Lucy would probably have to make many more loaves, pies, puddings, and beds than they ever made in Mr. Brown's establishment at Clapham Rise or Notting Hill. But it is to be recollected that owing to the verandah-cottage character of the houses and to the more simple style of living, household work would be much lighter in the New Zealand establishment; and further, that though at Clapham, did the butcher catch Mrs. B. in the kitchen making a loaf, he would probably send in his bill and demand instant payment; and that though Miss Lucy's making a bed at Notting Hill might annihilate her matrimonial prospects for ever, no such deplorable results would ensue from the like deeds in New Zealand, where every lady

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makes herself useful as well as ornamental, and thus blooms in more roseal charms. The house we build, too, is ever a palace; and there is a vast difference between making a loaf or a bed for ourselves for love, and in making them for our masters and mistresses for money.

6. ASSUMED SOCIAL DEFICIENCIES, ABSENCE OF GOOD SOCIETY, AMUSEMENTS, AND MEANS OF EDUCATION. --This is, or rather used to be, one of the commonest objections to emigration; but, unquestionably, as regards emigration to New Zealand, it is one of the most unfounded and unjust. Whatever may have been the faults and failings of that Wakefield system of colonisation on which New Zealand emigration was founded, and they are neither few nor light, the system had this merit, it drew to New Zealand a much higher class of emigrants than had ever left the mother country since the Cavalier Settlements of Delaware and Virginia were founded; and selected its free-passage, working emigrants so carefully, that almost every mechanic and labourer carried to New Zealand was a picked man.

Petres, Molesworths, Cliffords, Dillons, Tancreds, Congreves, Wortleys, Vavasours, Cholmondeleys, scions of many old English families, have settled in New Zealand. A considerable portion of the Canterbury colonists were such people as you meet at fat rectors' tables and good country-houses. Retired professional men turned agriculturists, "vieux moustache" of the line or Indian service grown cunning in wool, quiet country families with broods of sons and daughters, enterprising younger sons, all living on and creating their little estates, with a considerable sprinkling of black coats, scarlet coats, government officials, and the mercantile classes, constitute full half the entire population of the colony. I think no stranger would now visit Zealandia without being agreeably surprised at the high but homely tone of society, and forcibly struck with the steady industrious character of all orders of the young community; and for friendliness of feeling, pleasantness of intercourse, intellectual and moral endow-

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ments, I fancy the social circles of New Zealand would generally be found quite equal to anything which the emigrant family had left in England.

New Zealand is not a country of pig-sties and palaces, paupers and millionaires, and twenty intermediate castes; but a country of cottages and two classes, an independent middle class and an independent labouring class. In New Zealand, therefore, we find none of those inequalities in society, none of those scrupulous "ko-toeing" ceremonies and distinctions which poison half our social enjoyments at home. In New Zealand no one cuts us because we don't keep a carriage, for there, as before observed, we all keep our carriages; we don't turn grey from anxiety to get out of this "set" or to get into that "set," for there is but one set, and we are in and of it; we are all county families, we all go to Almack's, we are all of the "haute volee," and we all go to Court.

It should be remembered, too, that the goodness of society in emigration countries like New Zealand, good as it may be, is improving. People are now beginning to ask themselves very frequently whether emigration be only a resource for paupers, whether it be not a career for a gentleman quite as honourable as any profession, and far more profitable; and we may now meet a class of families in emigrant vessels who, ten years ago, would almost have shuddered had an emigrant come between "the wind and their nobility."

In regard to sports and pleasures, such things as public amusements, sights, theatres, and raree shows, are, of course, few and far between; but these things are needed for blase loungers in old-world cities, rather than for active colonists in a colony. A family occupied on their own acres, creating an estate which they are to enjoy, are every day performing in a varied theatre of real life, which exceeds in interest, and far exceeds in profit, the mimic play. Every settlement, however, has its annual anniversary sports, its races, race-balls, flower-shows, regattas,

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concerts, lectures, and occasional public festivities; and there are quite as many public amusements as colonists need, or can enjoy. 6

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Frigid dinner-parties, where heavy men in mourning meet in stolid gravity to devour more than they can digest,

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and to muddle themselves with curious sherries and compounded ports, are calamities from which New Zealand

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at present is happily free. But there is a great deal of homely hospitality and friendly informal "fortune-du-pot" visiting among the colonists; and social meetings, merrymakings, harvest-homes, fetes champetre, tea and dance parties, gypsy parties, kiss and pic-nic parties, &c, succeed each other in quick succession.

In fact, nothing can be more preposterously absurd than to picture the life of the New Zealand emigrant of the present day as one dull round of dreary toil, without a gleam of sunny pleasure; as all chop, chop, dig, dig, for the men--all wash, wash, mend, mend, for the women. Why should it be so? It is quite true that the emigrant must work; but it is equally true that a comparatively moderate working, either of head or hands, will give him "plenty and to spare." Now, he who has this, is just the man who can afford to laugh and enjoy himself a little; and it is frequently remarked, and with great truth, that colonists, as compared to old country folk, are a very merry set of people. The honest man who creeps along the London streets under the burden of a large family and the income-tax, whose life is one continued struggle against the fierce competition of his neighbours, whose to-day closes in anxiety, and whose to-morrow dawns without hope, does not laugh much, and would almost as soon commit petty larceny as a joke. But transplant him to "laughing plenty" in Zealandia, or in some other good colony, and he will joke fast enough; or possibly become jolly and blown into a Mark Tapley.

Let intending emigrants remember, then, especially the younger portion of them, that if they will only work, they certainly may also play; and that the sports and pastimes, the social pleasures and amusements of their fatherland

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will still be theirs in New Zealand--a little shorn, may be, of the polished lacquer of high refinement, but gaining in hearty homeliness and honest sincerity.

With respect to religious and educational institutions, there is little to desire.

In the north, an excellent college, on a scale that would do credit to a colony fifty years older than New Zealand, has been founded by our admirable bishop, Dr. Selwyn. Churches of almost every denomination, grammar schools, academies, and seminaries, are found in almost every settlement; and the means of education in New Zealand are probably quite equal to those of many country towns and rural districts in England. Where, however, there is a large family of young children, and where the means of the emigrant would permit of such a profitable addition to his forces, I should recommend his taking out a governess; a young lady who, vowing to remain in "maiden meditation fancy free," for at least a year, would box the children, help the mistress, and make herself generally useful, striking, and agreeable; for though public schools are good, roads to learning are not royal, and the small day scholar is occasionally ingulphed in the deep mud rut.

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SOCIAL POSITIONS WHICH NEW ZEALAND EMIGRATION WOULD IMPROVE--WHO SHOULD EMIGRATE.

RETIRED GENTEEL FAMILIES.--No class has stronger reason for emigrating, none would be more benefited by emigrating, than that large class known as the "Retired Genteel Families:" younger sons who have married on small patrimonies, professional men who have abandoned professions, officers retired from the various services, and the like, who, with capitals of £3000 to £5000, retreating from the roar and bustle of life, have either congregated in

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little troops in cheap continental towns and the channel isles, or isolated themselves in quiet village nooks, to eke out their slender means and to vegetate through life in genteel poverty and precarious independence.

Families of this order do not embrace this cold unfruitful life because they like it, they are driven to it-- poverty is the unstatutable offence of modern conventionalism, and has transplanted them to holes and corners where poverty is the common lot. Our imperious social mandate forbids them to improve their fortunes in any of those so-called ungenteel pursuits which their small capitals would enable them to embark in. No gentleman of this order could turn tradesman, and keep a shop; Brahmin born, he must Brahmin live. The higher, "large-capital-demanding," pursuits, are as effectually barred from him as if they did not exist. Whilst assuming that society would allow him to embark in the one, or that capital would allow him to embark in the other, that he became tradesman or brewer, what would be his chance of success? --the competitive warfare which he, a novice, would have to wage in either line against adversaries trained in all the wily trickeries of trade would rout him from the field with loss of baggage and military chest.

With the reader's permission, we will take a fair average specimen of this class, glance at their common position and prospects here, and then glance at what they might make their position and prospects in New Zealand. Let us suppose our retired genteel family to be father and mother, and two or three sons and daughters, having a funded £4000 yielding them, if they have emigrated to the Continent and escaped income-tax, £160 a year or nine shillings a day for seven people. To point out the true position of this family, would be to point out the position of the sun at noon day. We all see it, and if we turn away from it, it will not be on account of its brilliancy: look at the father passing through life sucking his cane top on the Boulogne pier, a superior pot-house quidnunc -- look at the daughters, shabby-smart, their

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looming future the pale governess or celibacy in lodgings --look at the sons, acquiring tastes and habits no more fitting them for the pursuits they will descend to, than the peacock's plumage fits him to battle with the eagle.

Now led by their fortunate star this family moves to New Zealand. Half their capital enables them to buy 500 acres of fertile land, to build themselves a handsome cottage and to cultivate, and in two or three years to create, a snug estate, the annual produce of which shall enable them to live in easy peace and plenty, and to practise a hearty, if homely, hospitality. The remainder of their money put out on good security at £10 per cent, produces them an annual £200, which annually may be added to their money capital, or profitably invested in land; and in all human probability, the estate which they have formed would in five or six years' time be worth, and would actually fetch in the market, three or four times what it had cost to create (see pages 359 and 417). They have a far more plenteous table than before, are as well clothed, enjoy a finer climate, probably better health, finer natural scenery, and society at least as good as that which they have left, and probably far better and more beneficial. If the head of the family be ambitious of public life, local and general Parliament are open to him; and though this may provoke a smile, we may perhaps assert that framing the laws and guiding the affairs of a young nation like New Zealand is quite as interesting, and probably quite as high a mission as that of tinkering up the moss-grown institutions of any old-world State. When their time comes, sons and daughters marry among their equals, and have each that handsome portion in cash capital and colonial experience which enables them to commence a new step of rising in the world, and to look forward to their own children, vigorous natives of the soil, continuing the upward progress borne on by the rising fortunes of the young and growing land.

Families of this description so fixed in New Zealand, with a good general servant or two as at page 462; are

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virtually in the position of a "county family;" they literally become the country gentry, magistracy, and squirearchy of the new land. And always assuming that they accept the new career heartily, that papa and mama, girls and boys, are volunteers, not pressed men, if the ladies will excuse the Irishism, if they only be willing to laugh at first changes, small roughings and make-shifts; if they all be willing to make themselves useful both with head and hand, to do as everybody else does, put on the merino and go into their own kitchen, pull off the coat and go into their own fields, there is, humanly speaking, no doubt that New Zealand emigration will substantially improve their lot, and more or less in the very manner we have pictured.

I do not for a moment conceal, on the contrary I would desire to blazon forth, that to realize this new estate in the new land, such a family, at first in particular, would have to do many things for themselves which they never did before, would have to perform for themselves many semi-menial domestic offices, and would all have to put their shoulders willingly to the wheel; but I say these things are but the scratches in getting through the wood, and I look at the prize won when they are through the wood. The work we ask them to do is the work their equals around them do, work which they can do, nay, work which in three cases out of four they would like to do, work which, physically, morally, mentally, they would be all the better for doing, work not derogatory to countess, peer or peasant to do. Is a man, noble or simple, less honourably engaged ploughing his own fields in New Zealand, than hulking through the dirty streets of some Continental refuge for the "destitute-genteel," and dining at the dingy one franc table d'hote with "pain a discretion?" Is his wife less the lady busied in the goodly kitchen of the rising farm, than sitting stiff in twice-turned silk in the faded parlour, listening to the miserable fadaises of military dowagers, and the bleeding experiences of that great card warrior Captain Rook? Are his daughters less delightful, because they

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have shelved the brigand and the 119 sorrows of some stupendous heroine, and opened "she stoops to conquer" Soyer and the cookery books? Are they less elegant or wife-like, busied butter-making, or rosy in the blooming garden, than pale daudling over some protracted crochet monster or hurdygurdy harpsichord? Are his sons less likely to grow into honourable, and useful men, because high slang and low billiards have flown before the healthy activities of the stock station and the harvest field?

Surely not. Surely we must think that families of this and many kindred types would have longer and happier and more prosperous and more honourable lives "estate-creating" in New Zealand, than in muddling away their best days in the sterile fields of genteel poverty at home; and did we not remember the tyranny of custom, the force of example, that habit is stronger than nature, we might I think well marvel that so many thousands of this class are content to lead the wretched life they do; content whilst hungry, to creep on in the old path which leads to barren briars, instead of stepping into the new path hung with goodly fruit, where they might pluck and eat their fill.

PROFESSIONAL MEN.--Families of ill-paid struggling professional men could now do in New Zealand, precisely what the "retired genteel family" class could do; and such families have, I fear, quite as much substantial cause for getting to a newer and wider land.

The brief remarks page 421, may show that professions are at least no hindrance to any fresh career in New Zealand; whilst the following extract, taken I think from an emigration article of the "Times," pictures a state of things far too true and real.

"Here industry seeks employment, talent occupation, and capital investment. There are--explain it how you will, or propose to remedy it as you choose--there are at present too many of us in this country. It is not only that there are

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too many bricklayers, carpenters, wheelwrights, smiths, and weavers, but too many lawyers, doctors, half-pay officers, and small capitalists--in short, too many men living on a bare subsistence, without the prospect of leaving the same to their children. These people are, in some respects, worse off than parish paupers. The latter can sink no lower than they have sunk-- nay, they may rise higher. Their children, at the worst, take their degradation by inheritance, and may rid themselves of it. But what is, too frequently, the prospect of the professional man who, by incessant labour, contrives to eke out a subsistence for a large family? If he dies, what is to become of them? If he leaves nothing, they must sink into pauperism. If he leaves a little, are they much better off? Take the case of a man who leaves a fortune of £4000 between five or six children. What does this amount to? To a costly and, perhaps, barren education. The sons go out as clerks, private tutors, or curates. The daughters fade into governesses in 'genteel families' at Tooting or Blackheath. We need not enlarge upon either situation. Quis non Eurysthea durum novit? Who does not know the struggles of indigent and educated gentility, of struggling mediocrity and starving refinement?

"The middle classes--nay, the 'comfortable' members of the middle classes are quite as much interested in emigration as those who are by a misplaced emphasis called 'the working classes.' Every man who is bringing up his children to any craft is interested in finding for them a field of work more ample than can be found at home. Every man who will leave a small fortune to his children is interested in finding for them a more rich and remunerating investment than capital can acquire in a country where profits are compressed by the competition of money to their minimum.

"Not in one grade or class, but in all, may be found men and women who hide the realities of an irksome indigence beneath the semblance of a coveted content, and who increase the burden of a dependence which they cannot relieve by the weight of a pride which they cannot control. It is not only in the dark alleys and fetid passages in which mechanic drudgery reposes from its daily task--it is not in the narrow and noisome lanes which skirt the suburbs of a manufacturing town--it is not in these alone that men eat the bitter bread of disappointment and distress. There is other labour than that

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of the spade, the plough, and the loom, which yearns for the employment which it cannot get; there is other poverty than that of the Dorsetshire labourer or Lancashire operative which might deserve the mercies of a workhouse. We omit to name the long list of those who have been ruined by profligacy or impoverished by prodigality. The spendthrift and the libertine claim neither the assistance of the State nor the sympathies of society. But there are others who without the sin have suffered the punishment of the thoughtless. There are countless numbers of men whose worst fault is the unconscious misdirection of talent and the unadvised misapplication of capital--who have brought to the common mart of human traffic productions too costly or acquirements too ordinary for the necessities of daily life--and who retire with withered hopes and seared hearts from a premature struggle with fortune. London could tell of hundreds of needy adventurers, ferreting every nook and cranny of possible occupation-- taking refuge from the persecutions of starved but stubborn pride in every euphemism imaginable--ignoring the habits of early youth and the impressions of early education in the most obnoxious pursuits and the most unseemly toil:--of artists whose easel rots in the obscurity of passive discontent; of scholars whose lore has been barren of profit, and fertile of discomfort:--of lawyers and doctors whose science rusts in the poor garret or the squalid chamber--in a word, of men of education, acquirements, and capacity, whose means have been exhausted in preparing them for an arena which they are doomed to quit in the first agonies of a premature failure.

"These men are to be pitied. It goes to the heart to see a man of refinement and taste pining on less than a pauper's daily food. It is a bitter sight to witness the repining discontent or the sullen magnanimity of those who, brought up as gentlemen, crave the wages and the work of office-sweepers and errand-porters. Yet of such is London full. What is common in the metropolis is not rare in the provinces. Other cities exhibit in their different proportions the same anomalies of society and the same asperities of fortune. There is in the British empire an enormous aggregate of unemployed capabilities and unprofitable skill."

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FAMILIES TRAINING SONS FOR PROFESSIONS. -- How often do we see a struggling middle-class family sacrificing or curtailing their own modest pleasures, pinching, saving, scraping, to spare the means of putting one son in a profession! The perfect training and education of this son for any of the professions will, I apprehend, cost from £1000 to £2000--well handled, literally a fortune in New Zealand--will it be a fortune in the profession? Of the thousand and one young men who every year enter the serried ranks of church, army, navy, civil-service, law, medicine, how many help themselves on, and help their families on, and how many fail to do either? Now that our Crimean disasters, the blunders of our diplomacy and civil-service, are tending to break up the old system of patronage, to promote merit rather than rank, to put the best man in the best place, it seems to be thought that the professions will be a better career, and in one sense they will--but there will be no more prizes in the professions and no fewer blanks; the hundreds will still continue to draw the one, the thousands to draw the other. It is only that A may get the prize instead of B; and now that A and B are to start fair and know the laws of the course, B may win as well as A.

Would it not he wise policy on the part of such a family to give their "hope and prop," a nobler, a richer, and a far more certain career, than arms, arts, law, civil service, physic or divinity? Would it not be better to send him to New Zealand, get him letters of introduction, and to place him with some good colonist at £100 a year, as their pioneer herald laying the foundation of a better fortune for them all? If we could see the "balance sheets" of thousands who entered the professions ten years ago, I fancy that the answer to our question would be a most emphatic affirmative. Are there not hundreds of clever young men grey in the law, who scarce make enough by law to pay for wig and gown; hundreds of young surgeons, who for all they get, had better be barber surgeons, and add shaving to bleeding; hundreds of meek curates in

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rusty black, who preach the evils of wealth, and exemplify the evils of poverty, on a hundred a year with six children? And with facts like these patent to us all, is there really much difference in the sanity of the acts, whether you pitch £1500 into the sea, or spend it in training a son for law, church or physic?

Our own goose is ever a swan, and we think swans are never plucked; but goose or swan, the professions frequently pluck our bird, and when they leave him his feathers, they often dole him but little grass and less corn.

BACHELOR HEIRS. -- Some writer asks "how many young men are there with capitals of from £1000 to £3000 who consume in the fatal inactivity of a lounging life, the youth, health, strength and money, which would be of incalculable service to them in a colony; with sisters sinking into governesses, brothers drooping into clerks; throwing away all the advantages of mental cultivation, barely living, and that without position, prospect or ambition. Why is it that so many of this class prefer stagnation amidst luxuries which they cannot share, to the creation of an independence which they might transmit to their children amid the plains and valleys of a new world?"

Why indeed!--a young man of this class, our "bachelor heir," has often no profession; and any good pursuit of trade might require more capital than he could command, or impose more plodding industry, confinement, and restraint, than he could bear. He passes his early days in a sort of "grub and butterfly" existence, consuming honey much faster than he makes it. You see him patent-boot pet of evening parties, glossy in moustache, tight in glove, correct in collar, accurate in stud, glorious in raiment and fine linen, cool to the ladies, imposing in gravity and the noli me tangere air, the "rose and the expectancy" of the fair room. You meet him at the Derby; or at the Freres Provencaux; or up the Dee, trouting;

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or in Norfolk, shooting; or at the Casino, or at the Star and Garter, with "a little party in pink;" and ten years after, facilis descensus--he gives you your ticket on the Great-Western, seedy parent of five children and a baby, tenant of a brick-box, and master of £60 a year!! Or, if he has shunned marriage, and been prudent, you find him at fifty, the old beau in stays, forcibly feeble in whist and twaddle, a neuter-negative and blase fribble, victim of dyspepsia and sport of Cyprians!!

Could he but have read the future, he would have early asked Cousin Lucy her opinion of matrimony and emigration, have taken her and her advice, a brother and a sister, and gone to some new land; when, ten years after, we might have come on him in New Zealand, the jolly country squire, with brood of blooming children and lord of ten thousand sheep.

Whilst the breeze lasts, whilst there is any wind in the sails, it is seldom too late to tack and stand off shoals; and if such a youth thinks he has dissipated too much of his means to allow him fair chance in the new career, what easier than to advertise in the Times or Australian and New Zealand Gazette, for a "New Zealand Emigration partner," join himself to some stout ally with a few hundreds, proceed to New Zealand, turn pastoral cavalier, and find the golden fleece?

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INVALID EMIGRANTS.--I trust that no medical reader will imagine for a moment that I would defraud him of his professional prey of long-suffering valetudinarians, by recommending all such to throw physic to the dogs, and to swallow New Zealand emigration as a sort of bolus specific. But there are many excellent families in Great Britain who are neither exactly emigrants nor exactly invalids, but who verge on both: families, some of whose members cannot live comfortably in England, and who emigrate to Madeira, Nice, Naples, or some Mediterranean

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Sanatorium, partly on climatic, partly on pecuniary considerations. One or two families of this class have already left Madeira to settle in New Zealand; the general testimony as to the invalid merits of the New Zealand climate confirmed by the remarkable tables, pages 112 and 556, seem to prove that as a "Sanatorium" for the majority of ills flesh is heir to, New Zealand is actually the first place in the world. The voyage would, I apprehend, be found generally beneficial, and once landed in the breezy England of the South, the invalid family might find that the Rev. Mr. Yates in his excellent early work on the country, used no idle figure of speech when he said that "there the sickly become healthy; the healthy, robust; and the robust, fat."

"But it is not only that New Zealand is said to be superior as a "Sanatorium" to many European resorts, it is superior as an "Exchequer," it is not only that an invalid family might become more robust in New Zealand than in Nice or Madeira, they would become richer, some two or three times richer positively, and many times richer, relatively. If with £5000 to £6000 invested in the funds, they emigrate to the Mediterranean or Madeira, they have an income of less than £300 a year; this sum invested in good landed securities in New Zealand, would produce them an income of at least £600 a year: and a family with £600 a year in New Zealand would occupy a social position which they would not command in England with £1200 a year.

In short, it appears to me that families of this description, either with small or larger capitals, might advantageously plant themselves on the shores of Cook's Strait, or in the Nelson bayside-Brighton Settlement; invest three-fourths of their capital at £10 per cent., buy 50 acres in some geranium dell inland, or in some myrtle clad nook by the sea, put up a rustic rose-covered cottage, keep cow and pony, cultivate the garden, tend the bees and flowers, rear game and fruits, fatten their own poultry, brew their own beer, kill their own mutton, sit under their own vine and fig-tree; have good society, beautiful

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scenery, and every domestic comfort; and really pass a very pleasant easy-active life, where dyspepsia, ennui, hypochondria, and many a demon of disease would find no lurking-place, or resting spot.

COMPETITION-CRUSHED TRADESMEN.--No class of people emigrate more freely or more successfully than families who, owing perhaps, to a combination of bad debts, low profits, short custom, excessive competition, rates, rents, and taxes, have literally cut the shop, and made off to a new country before bankruptcy; and it appears to me, that many a young man, bred to business, steady, active, intelligent, married, and about to open shop with a few hundred pounds, might well pause a moment ere he put up his name and consider his chances, pause and take warning, and then follow his seniors' good example.

Almost every nation affects some popular myth, tradition or belief. The Chinese, I think, consider their Emperor to be ex officio brother of the moon, a tribe of ragged savages in Central Africa call themselves "first flower of the earth," Jonathan guesses he is free and can whip the British, Welshmen are ancient Britons, and had a prince called Madoc, Prussia swears by philosophy and police.

We are a nation of shopkeepers, our " myths" are commercial: in 1857, we still quote "Whittington and his Cat," and believe in "industrious apprentices," and our Sir Peter Pertinax and Sir Peter Laurie oracles, still tell such young tradesman as the above, that he may become Lord Mayor of London! Of course he may, but then he mayn't: and prosaic practice and the Insolvent Courts unfortunately show that he and hundreds like him, after a well-fought battle for the Civic Chair, only seat themselves in Whitecross Street.

But it is not only that the pecuniary results of small shopkeeping are bad--how about the moral? Do we not know that excessive competition and the insane rage of the

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public for cheap things, has made a considerable portion of the retail trade of this good kingdom, a lie and a sham? and is the wholesale much better? is there not "something rotten in our whole state of Trade?" is it only that we have heard of the Lancet, of Dr. Hassel, and of death in the pot, of rag prints, jewellers' shams, and publicans who should put up pestle and mortar for sign, and "drugs sold here?" do we not know that now-a-days, a bale of Manchester goods is bought in many a foreign market, much as we should buy a horse in Smithfield? have we not Banks, Ali Babi and the Forty Thieves, where each window should be lettered "cash and customers taken in here?" Of course we know all this; and we know that in many a retail trade a man, honest-willing as he may be, if he would live by his trade, is virtually obliged to do things which he knows to be wrong, things which a cheapness-smitten public lure, nay compel, him to do.

Deliberately to go into, or to continue in, a business that keeps thousands poor and makes some dishonest, surely cannot be either a prudent or a commendable step. Would not many who keep shop, or who are about to keep shop, and angle for stray customers in troubled waters, do better to close windows, elude the tax-gatherer, and clear off to a young country like New Zealand, whilst they have the few hundreds left wherewith to escape?

TENANT FARMERS.-- Small tenant farmers with large families, have very powerful reasons for emigrating, and are admirably fitted for New Zealand emigration.

Many a hard-working industrious man of this class, except that he has got enough to eat, is here little better off than one of his day-labourers. What with rent, tithe, tax, and game-laws, the small farmer's share of the annual produce of his hired acres is a very meagre share. He, of all men, is the man who eats his bread by the sweat of his brow; all but "adscriptus glebae" he toils through life at the muck cart as his father did before him, and for what?--

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to get the rent for audit day. If his sons are lucky, they may look forward to doing the same--if unlucky, they will take country service or the Serjeant's shilling, and march to glory at sixpence a day; and his daughter will become the squire's menial and wed the groom, or the poor milliner girl with her pleasant path of city life. He farms his landlord's acres, and his landlord farms him, and the latter has the best estate. The sum which a hundred-acre tenant farmer pays in one year for his rent, tithe and tax, would buy and stock him a New Zealand freehold of 200 acres. In New Zealand he would be Landlord; his little capital would at once place him in the position of an independent yeoman, farming his own estate; and with common industry, with half the anxious toil and trouble of his old-world life, every member of his family in a few years' time would be married, settled, and provided for in a manner which might well have seemed incredible to him had he remained "tenant toiling" in England, on the hundred acres which he hired.

THE COUNTER AND THE DESK.--As to the host of young men, the "waste-surplus" of our lower middle class families, whose chief solicitude is the ways and means of earning honest bread, what can we say! Is is not notorious that young fellows of this class, fairly educated, active, honourable, and intelligent as they may be, really seem to be of less value and consideration to society, than new mangles, patent ploughs, or prize pigs?

Tastes differ, and it is well they do. But rather than be thus appraised, rather than grow up here cumberer of the earth with no better chance than that of finding myself some day behind the counter with a bonnet on, measuring tape and bobbin to mincing misses, or of becoming the snubbed clerk with the pale wife and the seedy children, nailed to the dingy desk for life for £60 a year, I would turn and breast the current; pull off my coat, take six months at

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some manly handicraft, and then, spite the dark warnings of Aunt Tabitha, spite the twaddle of my male friends in petticoats, I would secure cheap passage to Australia or New Zealand and taking ten pounds and my trade, common sense, common energy, common industry for my arms, would trust to God and myself to achieve me a happy escape and a good deliverance from that grinding, social serfdom, those effeminate chains, my born and certain lot in England.