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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 62

British Colonisation: A Colonial Want and an Imperial Necessity

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British Colonisation: A Colonial Want and an Imperial Necessity.

It is a startling fact that of the 350,000,000 inhabitants of the 11,000,000 square miles which constitute the British Empire, no less than 340,000,000 are crowded upon the 121,000 square miles of the United Kingdom, and the nineteen hundred miles in length and breadth of the Indian Empire. Or, to put the matter in a more concrete form, on the 121,000 square miles of the United Kingdom the recent census has revealed a population of nearly 40,000,000, while on the three million square miles of Australasia there is only a population of about four millions—a little over one inhabitant to every 640 acres of land.

As I am addressing Londoners I may still further elucidate this social anomaly by stating that upon the area which constitutes this Metropolis, although it is only a four-thousandth part of the size of the seven Colonies of Australasia, there are crowded over a million more people than are to be found in the whole of those vast areas, counting in the 242,000 aborigines. I say this is a very startling fact, but there is another fact still more startling, and that is that among all the quack doctors who are consulted as to the social evils of this Great Britain, no one appears to think seriously of the obvious remedy of the Greater Britain. All kinds of remedies for the evils consequent on our over-crowding are obtruded upon us. Trades' Unions have for nearly half a century been trying the efficacy of strikes, but if we are to believe the dolorous notes of our modern working-class leaders, Messrs. Burns, Mann, and Tillett, the toilers are but

"The worse for mending, wash'd to fouler stains."

page 10 Never, according to these energetic reformers, were the English working classes in worse case.*

Then we have the Socialists with their drastic measures. Everything is to be municipalised. Private ownership, whether of land, workshop, or warehouse, must be abolished. Henry George—modest man!—did not go far enough when he only demanded that individual landowners should be robbed for the benefit of the community generally. With fine scorn of so timid a measure as this, Mr. G. Bernard Shaw tells us that to tax the land up to twenty shillings in the pound—Mr. George's mode of confiscation—would be but to "dump four hundred and fifty millions a year down on the Exchequer counter, and then retire with three cheers for the restoration of the land to the people " (Fabian Essays, p. 309). "The results of such a proceeding," says Mr. G. Bernard Shaw, " if it actually came off, would considerably take its advocates aback. The streets would presently be filled with starving workers of all grades, domestic servants, coach - builders, decorators, jewellers, lace-makers, fashionable professional men, and numberless others whose livelihood is at present gained by ministering to the wants of these and of the proprietary class. 'This,' they would cry, 'is what your theories have brought us to! Back with the good old times, when we received our wages, which were at least better than nothing'" (ib. p. 190).

Thus do our social doctors differ; and so the fooling or knavery goes on, while the magnificent panacea of our boundless Colonies is altogether ignored.

The venerable reformer, George Jacob Holyoake, has his sovereign remedy of Co-operation, and just as we were beginning to think the way was at last opened to the Promised Land, Miss Beatrice Potter comes forward with her pulverising critique, and

* It is a matter for universal congratulation that Mr. Burt, the President of the Trades Union Congress, has in his inaugural address at Newcastle sounded the death-knell of Strikes. To hear from the chair of Trades Unionism words so pregnant with good sense and Christian feeling as Mr. Hurt's address is a proof of the educational power of Unionism.

page 11 lo! we hear again the old wail—"Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there?"

Co-operation, of which we have heard so much, Miss Potter tells us simply resolves itself into another form of successful shopkeeping. Even the Co-operative Productive Societies are a failure, only eight of the fifty-four existing ones examined by her are marked by true Co-operative principle. They are "merely combinations of small masters" Miss Potter informs us, "employing the labour of non-members for their own benefit." (See Appendix, p. 33.)

And so of the majority of schemes for social redemption, based upon mere manipulation of the limited opportunities of this little corner of the empire. They are little better than blind roads, leading to nowhere. Even political measures, such as free trade, extension of the franchise, public schools, and vote by ballot, result only in more or less disappointment as regards the masses. A handful of capitalists grow enormously rich, but as they do so a cry rises up from their employés that they are only sinking deeper in the mire,* and Mrs. Sigourney's mournful lines are as applicable as ever to their case:—

"Ye build! Ye build! but ye enter not in,
Like the tribes whom the desert devoured in their sin;
From the Land of Promise ye fade and die,
Ere its verdure gleams forth on your wearied eye."

What, then, we may well ask, is to be done? Must we follow Arthur Schopenhauer into his dismal swamp of pessimism? Is this to be the end of all the splendid patriotism of our race? Is this poor old world but "drifting along a torrent which insidiously bears it, not to Elysian fields, but to an unending Cocytus of woe"?

My address to-night is an answer to this inquiry. I am one of a small minority who look to the British Colonies for a solution of our social problems. My ideal State is not to be found

* I do not altogether endorse this outcry of the labourers. My conviction is that the condition of the working classes has been immensely ameliorated of late years. The strain of life is now severest in the middle classes.

page 12 on these overcrowded, competition-cursed islands, but where Robert Buchanan looked for it:—

"Where is the perfect slate, Early, most blest, and late,
Perfect and bright?
'Tis where no palace stands, Trembling on shifting sands
Morning and night.
'Tis where the soil is free, Where, far as eye may see
Scattered o'er hill and lea, Homesteads abound;
Where clean and broad and sweet (Market square, land, and street,
Belted by leagues of wheat), Cities are found.

"Where is the perfect state, Early, most blest, and late,
Gentle and good?
'Tis where no lives are seen, Huddling in lanes unseen,
Crying for food.
'Tis where the home is pure; 'Tis where the bread is sure;
'Tis where the wants are fewer, And each want fed;—
Where plenty and peace abide, Where health dwells heavenly-eyed,
Where in nooks beautified, Slumber the dead."

In other words, I am an emigration fanatic. As the result of twenty years of travel and observation throughout our Colonies, following in the track of tens of thousands of agricultural labourers and others who have within the last two decades gone to Canada or Australasia, visiting them in their homes, gathering their various experiences, observing their lives, and contrasting those lives with their lives as I so well knew them in Berkshire, Wiltshire, and Oxfordshire, I have reached a conclusion from which it will require a good deal of logic to dislodge me, and that conclusion is That by a well-organised system of British Colonisation not only may our Colonies be retained as integral and inseparable parts of the British Empire and their prosperity insured, but a large part of the social unrest of the parent country be permanently removed.

Like all other fanatics, I am lost in astonishment at the apparent insensibility of our statesmen and philanthropists to the value of my specific. I can understand the antagonism of the demagogue, as my remedy would infallibly close his commission. Were Government and people resolutely committed to a systematic page 13 removal of our dense population to the sparsely-populated areas of Canada or Australasia for a couple of decades, I dare venture to affirm that our Socialist propaganda would find themselves in Othello's place—their occupation would be gone.

Do you ask me for proof of this? I think I can can furnish it. At any rate I can give facts which will supply indisputable data for such an inference.

I might refer generally to the results of the past colonisation schemes in the two great emigration fields of Canada and Australasia,—the wondrous prosperity of the scotch settlers in Ontario, and the North-West Provinces, or the still more striking success of the great Church of England Settlement of Canterbury, New Zealand, and the Scotch Farmers' Settlement of Otago.

Take, for example, British Colonisation enterprise in New Zealand, and while for a few moments I concentrate your attention on half a century's doings there, I would remind you that very much the same story might be told of nearly each of the American States, and every province of the Canadian Dominion, not to speak of South Africa and the smaller British Colonies.

I would premise with a word or two on the remarkable growth of our Colonial Empire during the present reign. At the commencement of Queen Victoria's reign, when as a small boy at Clewer House School, Windsor, I formed one of a row of lads who drew up on one side of the Long Drive at Windsor, at the command of our master, to salute the young Queen, the total area of our Colonial Empire was 2,254.000 square miles, exclusive of British India. To-day, if we include British India, it stands at eleven million square miles. We can none of us grasp the meaning of this. When it is fairly grasped the hour of our national social redemption will have drawn very near.

Fifty years ago, as I need hardly remind you, the seven Colonies of Australasia were the happy—or rather, very unhappy—hunting-grounds of half a million or more ferocious savages. The only use of the vast areas—or such small portion of them as this country claimed, was as a dumping ground for British convicts. page 14 The boast of the handful of Britons who were found there was that they had "left their country for their country's good."

Now let me fasten your attention on one of these Colonies for a few moments,—the Colony of New Zealand, and I select that one simply because through several years' residence there I am most familiar with its history. Very similar facts might be given of each of the other Colonies of Australasia or of the Canadian Dominion.*

In the year 1840 the total exports of New Zealand amounted to £10,836. In 1890 the amount stood at £8,560,599. The imports grew from £85,002 in 1840 to £6,122,444 in 1890. The shipping grew from 21,155 tons inward and 17,413 tons outward in 1840 to 526,439 tons and 531,478 tons respectively in 1890. In 1840 the total number of sheep in the Colony was 1,889; in 1890 there were over 15,468,860 depasturing on the hills and valleys, and more than a million and a half sent yearly to supply the table of the British householder. Cattle had grown from 510 to 853,358, horses from 2 to 187,382, and the population from 2,050 to 620,545, exclusive of the Maori aborigines. The revenue had increased from the modest sum of £926 to £4,109,815.

These figures are eloquent of the meaning of our Colonies to the British Empire, Mr. Henry Labouchere notwithstanding, and eloquent also of their value as a factor in the argument of the future.

* New South Wales to wit. In 1841, when New Zealand separated from the parent Colony and started on her own account, the total population of New South Wales was 130,856. The entire revenue of the Colony was £682,473. The imports amounted to £3,014,189, and the exports to £1,399,692. On 31st December, 1888, the population numbered 1,085,740; the public revenue was £8,866,360; the imports stood at £20,885,557, and the exports at £20,859,715.

There were 2,206 miles of railway open, over 10,000 miles of telegraph, and in the 2,271 State Schools there were no less than 186,692 childen receiving their education.

The flocks of sheep which in 1821 numbered only 290,158, had grown in 1889 to 46,503,469, and the quantity of wool exported grew from 411,600 lbs. in 1825 to 261,353,484 lbs. in 1889. (See Appendix, p. 26.)

page 15

I have no wish to crush you with statistics, but perhaps you will bear with me while, by way of accentuating this point, I give you a few figures from an admirable lecture delivered in May last by Mr. Howard Vincent, M.P., to the Fellows of the Royal Colonial Institute. His point was to demonstrate the value of the British Colonies to the British public. He told us, among other startling facts, that the total volume of inter-British trade, that is, the external trade between each part of the Empire, as distinguished both from the internal trade between the inhabitants of each possession, or trade with any foreign nation, amounts to about £340,000,000 per annum.

Coming to details, Mr. Vincent told us that of a total import of wool of 700,000,000 lbs. yearly, 557,000,000 lbs. came from our Colonies. The mother country buys no less than £97,000,000 worth of produce from her colonial offspring, while the flourishing youngsters return the compliment by buying upwards of £90,000,000 worth of British merchandise annually.

Nor is this all. England has ever a plethora of wealth, and the Colonies have most generously done their share to relieve the distress. Mr. Vincent kindly reminded us that we of the Colonial Empire had borrowed the respectable sum of £280,000,000 of British Capitalists, exclusive of Harbour Board and private debts.

There are, of course, two ways of looking at this part of our Colonial enterprise. It is amusing to hear the wise remarks of some of our critics. One would almost imagine that we had spent the money on champagne to see the paternal solicitude on our behalf. Hogarth's "Rake's Progress" was nothing to it. The London financial organs—those exemplary divinities—have croaked themselves hoarse over our extravagances. It seems difficult for our disinterested critics to realise the difference between a National Debt like the £900,000,000 incurred by the United Kingdom in the last two hundred years for the prosecution of wars—mostly waged on behalf of senile monarchies and page 16 crumbling dynasties*—and colonial debts incurred for most valuable and highly remunerative public works, such as railways, harbours, postal and telegraph services, &c., &c. New South Wales, for instance, as we learn from the Colonial Treasurer, Mr. McMillan, in a recent utterance, "out of a total indebtedness of £46,000,000, has spent £38,000,000 on reproductive works, £6,000,000 on works partially reproductive, and the balance on fortifications, immigration and other services."

It would be well if the candid friends of the Colonies in the London Press would lay to heart the Hon. Mr. McMillan's protest anent its unjust criticisms.

"It is very hard," says this Colonial Treasurer, "to get out of the English mind the impression that our borrowings are not like those of other countries, but have been almost exclusively devoted to great works of public utility, yielding net revenue almost equivalent to the interest which we pay the English creditor."

I will not inflict more statistics upon you, but content myself with "pointing the moral of the tale." My argument is, that in the comparatively boundless areas of our Colonies we have a natural remedy for the evils which threaten us from over population; and that instead of wasting our energies and spoiling our tempers over revolutionary schemes of pseudo-reformers,—Land Nationalisation, patent receipts for avoiding or limiting the fruits of matrimony, and a great variety of other "pills for preventing earthquakes," we should set to work in business-like fashion to elaborate and carry out Colonisation schemes. It is sheer nonsense to be getting up a complaint against Providence for the number of children born to us. Population is Heaven's richest boon. There is no wealth at all comparable with a house full of healthy children. The cranky philosophers, male and female, who swear by Malthus, have never travelled over those glorious and sunlit areas of Canada, South Africa, and Australasia, and listened to their mute pleadings for the tickling of the implements

* It is only fair that I should qualify this statement to the extent of admitting the Colonial extension consequent on those costly wars.

page 17 of husbandry, or they would for ever after have held their peace. Never was such stupid blasphemy! Too many people born into the world! Let me give one incident of my colonial experience by way of application of the reductio ad absurdum argument to the Malthusian heresy.*

A dozen years ago I traversed a wild region some five-and-twenty miles south of the city of Nelson, New Zealand. The wild gorse, the sweet briar, the dog bush, and the manuka scrub, had entire possession of the hills and vales. Never was more God-for-saken-looking district. A year ago I visited that spot again, and what a transformation scene appeared! It was as if the magic wand of a Drury Lane pantomime goddess had been waved over it. Splendid crops of wheat, barley, and oats covered the flat land, and over the hills hundreds of sheep were disporting themselves. Instead of a wilderness I beheld a veritable garden of the Lord. A charming homestead occupied the central spot of a four or five hundred acre farm; and what was the secret of this strange metamorphosis? Yonder it stood before me in the shape of a sturdy settler and his half-dozen stalwart sons gathered under the broad verandah of the dwelling-house. On the central arch of the verandah was a Latin inscription, which being interpreted read thus:—" By my own strong arm, and the blessing of Providence."

I respectfully submit to the philosophic Radicals of Great Britain that that is the true way of dealing with the over-population question. Instead of impotent maunderings over their large families, let the heads of them imitate that brave Englishman, and go forth and utilise his children's strong arms in the subjugation of nature, and thus fulfil the will of the Eternal, "Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth."

It is high time the senile nonsense about "expatriation" was done with. I remember, while travelling through Canada some

* I am glad to find that Mrs. Besant, the whilom eloquent advocate of the Malthusian theory of population, has outgrown the wretched pessimism. Her emphatic renunciation of a fallacy for which she and Mr. Charles Bradlaugh were so willing to "endure the cross and despise the shame" marks an era in the history of the subject.

page 18 years ago, visiting a Scotch Highlander's Settlement. Those people got an immense deal of sympathy at the time of their "expatriation," and we were all called upon to curse the Scotch landlords who had routed them out. Never was sympathy worse wasted! I found the objects of it among the happiest and most prosperous of the Canadian settlers. Instead of the hand to-mouth beggary of their Highland life they had their own freehold farms, and were as free and independent as any English or Scotch landlords. And so of the "poor Irish" from Connemara, who, amid the maudlin whinings of their priests and political leaders, were driven by dire necessity to go out to Minnesota in 1883. Never was more blessed compulsion. In the Nineteenth Century Review for March, 1889, Mr. J. H. Tuke, through whose patriotic labours, and the powerful co-operation of the late Mr. W. E. Forster, and other wise philanthropists, some ten thousand inhabitants of the congested districts of Mayo, Galway and Donegal were emigrated to Canada, the United States, and Australia, gives us an account of their position and prospects. The striking change in the whole morale of these whilom paupers is One of the most eloquent testimonies to the emigration remedy that could possibly be written. As one reads the story of their marvellous welfare, their rapid rise from abject poverty to competency, their accumulating dollars, their domestic comfort, their high wages, their small freeholds—for by the end of 1887 a good number of them had bought and owned their houses and lots—I say as one reads the story it is impossible to resist the conviction that Mr. Tuke was much nearer solving the Irish difficulty than Mr. Parnell is ever likely to be, or even the best-framed Home Rule Bill that Mr. Gladstone may be able to devise.

In truth, were Colonisation systematically carried out by the joint co-operation of the Home Government and the Governments of the respective Colonies, not only would there be no English difficulty, but Ireland would soon cease to be the despair and the disgrace of the British Empire.

page 19

But I shall be reminded that the Colonies, more especially those of Australasia, do not want the blessing that I am desirous of bestowing upon them. I am fully aware of the Colonial feeling in the matter. It is one of the weak points of the democracy that they see only in every shipload of immigrants competitors in the labour market. They are victims of the old-world fallacy that labour is a fixed quantity, and therefore that the fewer the labourers the higher the wage. Mr. Henry George has, however, done much to dissipate this delusion, and as the colonial toilers come to realise that as labour is the sole creator of capital, it follows that the more labourers there are the more power to employ labour—i.e., the more capital will there be—we shall soon hear the last of the lamentable social heresy.*

It is but the old English Protectionism in another form, and as the British farmers and landlords found all their prognostications as to the universal ruin that was to follow Free Trade in corn, falsified by an era of unexampled prosperity, so our young colonial democracies will learn that "The clouds they so much dread," in the shape of British immigration, "Are big with mercies, and will break, In blessings on their head."

But I may also be reminded of the many unfavourable reports of emigrants' experiences abroad. "You tell us," it may be said, "of the Colonial successes, but you are silent as to the failures." In reply to this I might urge that inasmuch as the failures make so much noise about their non-success, it is hardly worth while to add to the dolorous ditty. But more may be said. Sooth to say the failures are usually abundantly easy of explanation. In the early days of the Colonies, and largely even until to-day, it was not the flower of the family that sought a home abroad, but the ne'er do well, the prodigal son, or the family scapegrace. The Colonies

* Common justice to my fellow-colonists compels me to say that they have something more than an excuse for their anti-immigration furore. A vast number of those brought out at their expense—for it should be remembered that the Australasian Colonies have spent nearly £6,000,000 sterling on immigration—have been worse than worthless. England has too frequently regarded her Colonies less as splendid fields of enterprise than as receptacles for her paupers, broken-down merchants, and family scapegraces.

page 20 were regarded as the dernier ressort of the family. And so of the business man or professional, it was the broken-down merchant, or the scarred doctor, or the broken-winded lawyer, who alone thought of emigrating. We are all familiar with the usual expression on hearing of so and so's having gone to Canada or Australia—"Ah! poor fellow! It's his only chance; God help him!" Hence, a rare assembly of promiscuous rascality abroad, which makes Colonists sometimes break forth with the impatient taunt—"One would think the old home read only over our entrance gates 'rubbish shot here.'"

This explains the newspaper grumbling. It is simply the old story of the "ill-used individual," of whom the late George Dawson used to lecture to us so sweetly cynically.

As I have taken the measure of some of the young swells who have turned up in Colonial seaports, or listened to the confused notions of some of the heads of families who have come out to "go upon the land "as they have called it—half-pay officers who have never done a stroke of work in their lives, London clerks with highly nervous organisations, and about as much nouse as a guinea-pig, self-indulgent idlers in the last stages of ennui, parsons who have worn out the patience of their English congregations by their soul-less repetitions of pious platitudes, and business men whose businesses have all run away from them, instead of wondering at the discouraging reports of the newspapers, and the stories of disaster which one has to listen to from the friends of the unfortunates, the marvel is that one hears so little of it. The shores of our colonial seaports are literally whitened with the bleached bones of the human débris which has been shot down upon them. I have met abroad some of the most unmitigated scoundrels that I have ever heard of outside the pages of a sensational novel. Undoubtedly there is a percentage of colonial failures which are not to be thus accounted for. The isolation of the new life is often so intolerable as to break down one's energies. I have often wished that Lord Byron had been compelled to spend six months in my lonely bungalow, away yonder in the Nelson hills where he could have satiated his sublime page 21 passion for solitude, and I have ventured to doubt, as I have literally sat "on rocks," and mused "o'er flood and fell," and slowly traced "the forest's shady scene."

"Where things that own not man's dominion dwell,
And mortal foot have ne'er or rarely been,"

or climbed

"The trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold,"

whether he then would have dared to affirm—

"This is not solitude—tis but to hold
Converse with Nature's charms, and view her stores unroll'd."

I am free to confess that it has seemed to me, the poet notwithstanding, something very much like solitude. In truth this is the real crux of the emigration question, and I am convinced that to be thoroughly successful emigration to the Colonies should be in colonisation groups.* The thing should be done systematically. Let a central organisation be formed—call it "The British Colonisation Society." Here should be collected reliable data as to Colonial areas suitable for settlement. Qualified pioneers should be sent out to view the land. The amplest information should be forthcoming as to the exact life that would have to be lived abroad. If farming was contemplated—what are its prospects, what capital is needed per acre, what return might be looked for, and what is the requisite experience. If business is intended—what are the Colonial conditions of success, what openings, and such like. And so of professional probabilities. I am convinced, as the result of my experience, that by such means the whole question of Colonial Settlement may be raised to its proper level of importance.

Of that importance I have already spoken. It cannot really be exaggerated, either as it regards the Colonies themselves or the mother country.

What are we going to do with our multiplying youth? Every avenue to life is choked here in England. It is simply pitiable

* Sec Appendix, p. 28, for details of a proposed Co-operative Colonisation Scheme.

page 22 to see our splendid youths and maidens—the finest articles of the kind in this lower world—our girls incomparably the sweetest, and our lads, thanks to the manly British sports, mostly embryo athletes, practically idlers on God's earth.

Is all this magnificent material to be wasted? Must these young Britons go on eternally kicking their heels about in their fathers' halls for want of occupation? Must these glorious girls go forward into womanhood only to swell the ranks of the frivolous hangers-on of the matrimonial market, to go down in shoals to the submerged masses of withered lives? I say most reverently, but most earnestly, God forbid!

I call upon our public men to bestir themselves in the matter. I ask the clergy of all denominations to awaken their young people to a nobler ambition than to be the crack shots of volunteer corps, the most regular at the tennis-court, the best decorators of altars, or the sweetest of sisters of mercy. Bid the young men go forth and fulfil the behests of the Eternal in peopling yonder interminable solitudes. Bid them go and reproduce in the Canadian and Australian Colonies all the best features of this noble English home life. Bid them go and neutralise by their wholesome lives the lowered tone brought about by the human rubbish that has been sent forth from the old home. Bid them go and win from the forest and the wilderness homes worthy of the girls they would fain make their wives. Bid them do this, and so realise the fond dream of our poet:—

"The pride to rear an independent shed,
And give the lips we love unborrowed bread;
To see a world from shadowy forests won,
In youthful beauty wedded to the sun;
To skirt our homes with harvests widely sown,
And call the blooming prospect all our own."

I would also invoke the aid of our legislators. What a beggarly array of falsehoods and foolings are for the most part our Parliamentry proceedings! Where is the measure that would compare in importance with one that should set apart a million pounds sterling annually for ten years for the work of Colonial page 23 Settlement? With this sum a hundred thousand sturdy Britons might yearly be placed on the wheat-growing lands of Manitoba, or fifty thousand on the mutton-growing hills and dales of New Zealand, or New South Wales, or in the orchards of fair and beautiful Tasmania.

Talk of percentage for outlay! Each inhabitant of the seven Colonies of Australasia is to-day a customer to the old home to the tune of £33. 9s. 9d. per annum, and we may safely assume that the £5,500,000 which Australasia has spent on immigration has repaid the Colonies fourfold.

In conclusion, I have only to add that if I have not succeeded in establishing my case as to the mutual importance of Colonisation to the mother country and her Colonies, it is only from a fear of wearying you with statistics. The evidence is vast and conclusive. Like mercy, the work of Colonisation is twice blessed. Twenty years ago the English agricultural labourers were in a most depressed condition. My advice to them was not to haggle with their employers over a paltry shilling or two extra per week, but to betake themselves to the Colonies where they would probably get almost as much per day as they were then getting per week. Happily they took my advice, and as a result of the extensive advertisement of the all-important article—practical experience and good tough muscle, through newspaper reports of Mr. Arch's visit to Canada in 1873, something like a quarter of a million labourers and their families found their way to the various British Colonies and the United States in the course of a decade What came of the exodus may be learnt from one among scores of cases which have passed under my notice during my residence in New Zealand. I was walking along one of the Nelson roads some years ago when a labouring man thus accosted me: "Baint you Maister Clayden?" I replied that it was so. "Ah! you was the gentleman," he then proceeded to say, "who used to tell we fellows to pack up our traps and be off to New Zealand. It was the best day's work that some of us ever did when we followed your advice." I, of course, was gratified, and wanted to know more What are you getting a week here?" I asked. "Two page 24 pound five, sir," he at once replied. "That is rather better than your old Berkshire wage?" I put in tentatively. "Rayther, sir!" said he, laughingly; " I never got more than eleven shillings there, and oftener nine or ten." "And what are your hours of labour?" I inquired. "From eight to five, sir," was his prompt reply, "with one hour for dinner." "And what do you do with all your money?" I went on to inquire." "Come and see, sir," was his answer." I took his address, and in the evening looked him up. I found him very comfortably fixed up in a pretty verandahed cottage, with a quarter of an acre of garden, well stocked with vegetables, fruit trees, and flowers. After he had shown me all there was to be seen, I shall never forget the merry twinkle in his eye as he turned to me with the proud boast, "And all my own, sir!"

I will not spoil that photograph by words further than to ask whether any work could be more philanthropic, more statesmanlike, or more patriotic than the wholesale metamorphosis of England's myriad toilers into self-reliant, contented, and independent colonists such as this old Berkshire acquaintance of mine? Do not ask me what is to become of the old home if thus denuded of its toilers. I hold most strongly that no country can afford to starve its workmen. The eternal Irish question only illustrates what sooner or later comes of injustice, and if Great Britain is to hold her own in the labour market competition with Greater Britain, it can only be done by ensuring to the producers here what is guaranteed to them abroad,—a fairer share of the results of their toil. And this can only be done by that scientific adjustment of population which is comprehended in the all-potent word Colonisation.