§ 7.—Facilities of Employment.

The great attraction, however, for an emigrant in leaving the mother country is the chance of ready employment. Generally speaking, what the emigrant proposes is either to get some land and cultivate it, or to work at the mines, or to engage in domestic service. It is not for the production of manufactures, or the cultivation of the fine arts, or literature, but to work the land and produce raw materials, or articles of food, that he leaves his home. What he must be prepared to do is to produce sugar and molasses, coffee and rum, in the West Indies; wool and meat in Australia; wool and wine at the Cape; coffee in Ceylon, wheat in Canada, and ever so many more articles in other colonies, or perchance go in search of gold in Australia, or of diamonds at the Cape of Good Hope. And in so doing he fulfils the highest economic mission of creating wealth where no wealth was created before. It has been suggested that for national purposes, if not on economic grounds, manufacturing industry ought to be fostered in the colonies, even at the expense of imposing heavy protective duties. And Canada and Victoria have so far acted on this principle that they have imposed high import duties in the hope that they will some day become great manufacturing centres. But is not this going against nature? Surely the colonies have a noble place assigned to them in the world's division of labour, when they page 11 have virgin soil in large quantities to bring into cultivation, and a boundless field for the employment of capital and labour. Throw all your mind on the production of what is indigenous to your soil, and do not trouble yourselves to produce articles for which your soil is not fitted or you yourselves have not the capacity.