THE

CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER.

DECEMBER, 1843.

Australia: its History and Present Condition, containing an Account both of the Bush and of the Colonies, with their respective Inhabitants. By the Rev. W. PRIDDEN, M.A. Vicar of Broxted, Essex. London: Burns. 1843. Colonization Circular, issued by Her Majesty's Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. No. 1, May, 1843. No. 2, July, 1843. No. 3, October, 1843. London: Knight and Co.

Tales of the Colonies, by a late Colonial Magistrate. London: Saunders and Otley. 1843.

Speech of his Excellency Sir George Gipps, in Council, on Friday, 9th of September, 1842, on the Resolutions proposed by the Colonial Secretary in Approval of the Report of the Committee on Immigration. Sydney: D. Welch. 1842.

Report of Immigration Committee for 1841. Sydney. 1842. Fraser's Magazine, October, 1843. Art. "New South WalesColonial Immigration-The Bounty System and its Frauds." General Report of the Land and Emigration Commissioners. November, 1843. London: Knight and Co.

THE appearance of Mr. Pridden's careful compilations from the many books of travels and various parliamentary papers in which the rise and progress of our Australian Colonies is delineated, enables us to open up the subject of Emigration, especially as connected with those settlements, and to bring down the information on the subject to a much later date than it was in Mr. Pridden's power to effect. And we do this the more readily in a periodical which chiefly circulates among the clergy, from the certain knowledge that they, by their advice and encouragement, can do far more than Poor-law or Emigration Commissioners, to overcome the opposition to Emigration so prevalent among our poorer classes, and to set in a right and proper view, without concealment or exaggeration, the real case of the

effects of Emigration, on the Colonies, the Emigrant, and the Mothercountry.

Had Mr. Malthus been correct in his theory of population, by this time the people of this country must have been making their daily meals on one another, not indeed metaphorically, but physically. Still it is evident that there was a truth in the professor's theory. In such a country as our own, production and employment cannot keep pace with population. There is a far narrower limit to the increase of production, and to the demand for labour, than to the progress of population. The experience of every one amongst us, whether in professions or in trade, compels us to admit that the cry is not for workmen, but for employment, and that with all our new methods of increasing supply and fostering demand, we are carrying on a constant struggle, one with another, for the bread we live upon. This want of employment is the source of all our political troubles—the prepared tinder which requires but the spark of the agitator to kindle it into flame. Give all the weight you can to political chicanery, to local or even political grievances, and you would fail in exciting the lower classes, did not want of employment and of food predispose them to discontent and violence. And this want of employment is not confined to manufacturing, or what are admitted to be over-peopled districts; it is all but universal. It was but a month since, that we were present at the Quarter Sessions of a purely agricultural county. The harvest had been abundant, the demand for workmen less restricted than in previous years, through the absence of the Irish reapers; and yet, with all these advantages, the calendar of prisoners was double what it usually is at that time of year, and was confined almost entirely to offences against property, where all that the prisoner could say in his defence was, "I had no work, and I am starving." For this state of things—a state daily and hourly increasing in distress-some remedy must be found; some remedy other than either poor-law relief, christian education, or judicial punishment. Parochial charity is a great, but a dangerous, remedy; let us do everything we can before we convert the free labourer into a pauper. Education-christian education--is a great boon; but it is ill talking to a starving man. It is very easy for us, with little to want for; with many a comfort, with many a luxury; to say to the poor man, "Thou shalt not steal;" but when cold poverty sits by the colder hearth; and hunger, with all its pangs and all its temptations, is the poor man's constant companion: oh! then, temptation assumes its most alluring form; and the poor man measures the enormity of his crime by the intensity of his distress. As for judicial punishment, what is it but a necessary evil? We must endeavour to provide employment for those who will work.

Seeing, then, that within our own shores we cannot reasonably hope to provide for the due employment of our rapidly-increasing population, we must assist them in seeking, in other climes, that sustenance which we cannot afford them here. You must assist them by

every means in your power, in seeking employment in other lands. At the same time, bear in mind the benefits that must result to you who are left behind, and so regulate your assistance as to induce the emigrant to seek that country whence the greatest benefit is likely to accrue to you in return. Encourage colonial, rather than foreign emigration. The labour, the capital, the skill, which you export in the form of emigrants, returns to the mother-country in the form of increased demand for her productions; and the labourer who, had he remained a poor man here, would, in all probability, have been a continued expense to the country, when removed to the colony becomes a contributor, by his consumption of British production, to the wealth of his old country. But, to ensure this result, the emigrant must be an industrious and good workman, not the refuse of society, too often regarded by people as the fit objects for emigration.

"The majority,' says a late writer on Colonial Emigration, who cry out for emigration as a panacea for our present distressed population, are too apt to regard it as a means for purifying the mother-country, and not as the best method for extending the demand for her produce, and thereby relieving her labouring classes, by establishing in more advantageous climes an industrious people, linked to us by the closest ties, who may raise what we require and take from us more produce, on the supplying of which so much of our prosperity depends. Doubtless, it is a great temporary benefit to relieve a particular district from the presence of the idle and the wicked. But it is a permanent good to create a demand for that produce, on the production of which the industrious live, whilst you permanently injure yourself, by preventing your colony, in consequence of the refuse population poured into it, from ever compensating you for the capital expended in thus removing, by wholesale, your dangerous classes. It is equally injurious to the colony, through the mother-country, to drain the latter of all her industrious population, as it would be to the mother-country, through the colony, to export from the former none but the idle and wicked portion of her population. An emigration of labourers without capitalists to employ them, is equally fruitless as an emigration of capitalists without labourers to turn their capital to profit.""

Since the year 1825, we have poured above a million of people into the United States, our American colonies, and those of Australia. Above sixty thousand, on an average, have annually emigrated from our country. Of these emigrants, a million have gone to America, for, until the establishment of the Bounty system in New South Wales, the emigrants to that colony were comparatively few. The consequence of this has been, that Canada and New Brunswick, though neither of them as yet suffering from a redundant population, are still fully peopled, and wages and employment commensurate with the abundant supply they have received in the last eighteen years. There is still just sufficient demand for good workmen, to induce a (comparatively speaking) small body of superior workmen to emigrate, but by no means that demand for average labourers that would

Within the last year, the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners, with the very proper view of meeting the increasing demand for information respecting the British Colonies, and general emigration to them, as well as for the purpose of furnishing information that can be depended on, and is not got up to favour this or

enable us to regard these Colonies as one of the means of relieving our over numerous population.

The other great labour-market is in a far worse state. The United States are overstocked with good labour; and can we wonder at it? In eighteen years, 504,944 persons have been sent from the United Kingdom to the States. For the last few years the unhealthy state of American commerce has produced a general stagnation throughout the country; confidence seems gene, and public works have long since come to a stand-still. Sixty-three thousand, however, emigrated to the United States last year; and what was their fate? Before the year was out; more than 6,000 had passed over into Canada, in search of employment, more than nine thousand had re-embarked at the one port of New York for this country. And mark! it was not from caprice, or for idleness sake, that this extensive re-emigration took place. The replies of the Government Emigration Agents agree in assigning want of employment as the only reason.

"Lieut. Lean, London: I understand that the reason assigned by the general body of the emigrants, when questioned as to the cause of their return to this country, (whether they were agriculturists or mechanics,) was, that they could not obtain any employment in the United States.

"Lieut. Hodder, Dublin: From the only sources of information accessible to me, namely, persons variously engaged in, or connected with, emigration, and the individuals themselves who have returned, I have, on personal communication, ascertained that the following reasons are assigned for their return; and having travelled five or six hundred miles up the country, and after pursuing the route to Philadelphia, crossing the Alleghany Mountains to Pittsburgh, and beyond it, in search of employment, they have altogether

that company, or this or that land speculation, have issued certain cheap pamphlets, called Colonization Circulars, replete with the latest government information, from the first of which the following Table of Emigration is derived:

failed, and that no reasonable prospect of obtaining a livelihood presented itself, and that they attributed their failure to the following causes :—1st. Cessation to the progress of all public works. 2ndly. A general stagnation of business. 3dly. A total want of confidence, which existed to such an extent, that it would appear the ordinary routine of life had come to a stand-still.

"Lieut. Friend, Cork: In reply, I beg to state, that the ship 'Roscoe,' from New York, bound to Liverpool, with returned emigrants, put into Cork harbour in want of water on the 2nd of October last, and landed about 100 persons in great distress, who stated that they had been unable to obtain employment in consequence of the general commercial depression in the United States. Two other vessels, the Henrietta,' and' Mary Anne,' also landed about forty passengers under similar circumstances; some of whom had been induced to emigrate to the United States from the misrepresentations of friends there, which they found totally unfounded.*

From such replies as these, which the Commissioners very properly make public, in order that the people may not be made the prey of designing puffers, it is evident that the United States can no longer assist us as a drain for the surplus of our population. The consequence is, that the quarter's emigration to the States has fallen from about 5,000 to 3,000, and that to Canada to less than a thousand. Where, then, are we to look for our necessary outlet, but to our Australian colonies? The West Indies, the Falkland Isles, the Cape, the Mauritius, all labour under the disadvantages of climate. But to compensate for this loss Australia becomes every day more able and more anxious to take from us our good surplus labour. Sydney, Port Phillip, Van Diemen's Land, Western and Southern Australia, and the thriving colony of New Zealand, can one and all consume our surplus labour, can borrow our living capital, with the certainty of repaying it to us in an increased demand for those productions, by the making or raising of which our country exists. With the view of counteracting the effects which the late depression of business in New South Wales has undoubtedly had on the emigration to that country, we propose to enter, in some detail, into the rise, progress, and present prospects and demands of New South Wales and its dependencies and neighbouring Colonies.

Until the rebellion of our American colonies compelled us to look abroad for some new spot whither the worst portion of our population might be sent, some new outlet for the convicts of the mother-country, the land of New Holland remained unnoticed since its first discovery by Cook in 1770. Sixteen years after the great Navigator's discovery, the government sent out the first convict colony to Botany Bay. A small fleet of eleven vessels carried between seven to eight hundred convicts, the marines necessary to guard them, provisions for two years, and such tools and agricultural instruments as were deemed necessary for the foundation of the new colony. Including every person in the fleet, Captain Phillip, the first governor of the new colony, led little more than a thousand persons as its primary colonists.

* Colonization Circular, No. I. p. 16.