The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1848-05-30 00:00:00

Ebsz iLibtrpool &taiOarb.

TUESDAY MORNING, MAY 30, 1848.

THAT Great Britain, as a nation, has not under-
stood and acted upon the important mission which
Providence appears to have designed for her, has
almost come to he regarded as an admitted fact;
and, for the omission, we are paying in the fearful
and increasing sufferings of all classes of the
people. Pauperism is steadily extending itself over
the land. The working masses underlie each other
for employment in vain. From our agricultural
districts, from Ireland and from Scotland, crowds
of able-bodied labourers pour daily into our large
towns, willing to work, and insisting to he fed, if
work cannot be found for them ; and already the
drain upon the resources of our trading classes and
rate-payers is becoming insupportable. In addition
to this local pressure, we have to contemplate an
embarrassed commerce, declining industry, a de-
creasing ability to consume home or foreign pro-
ducts, and the prospect of a large, and probably a
permanent, deficiency in the national revenue, to
be made up, in some way, by increased taxati-n.
What are we doing, as a nation, to meet and sub-
due, this great aggregate of difficulty ?—Nothing
worthy of us, or equal to the extent of the emer-
gency. We are, it is true, about to enter upon an
effort to reduce expenditure, and to render taxa-
tion, both local and national, more just in its
pressure ;—an effort the success of which is highly
desirable and necessary, although in itself sufficient
only to relieve us of a fraction of the load we have
to bear, and totally failing to meet the cause of our
sufferings. A few amongst us are amusing the
people with proposals of constitutional changes,—
offering toys to the masses who are crying for food ;
dreams for the substance ; elections and vote by
ballot to men who only want employment and
clothing. Such a movement, at such a time, can
only be productive of discontent and social danger.

Yet all this while we have within our reach the
'means of effecting a vast change for the better in
the condition and the prospects of our unemployed
and suffering masses, which we are either totally
neglecting, or, at all events, trifling with most
miserably. We have colonies belonging to the
British Crown—vast countries of unsurpassable
fertility—capable of absorbing population and in-
dustry ten-fold more than we can afford them, and
whose existing settlers are pining for the want of
that very labour which we possess in redundancy.
From our Australian colonies we learn, by the last
arrivals, that such is the demand for additional
hands, that good female servants are snatched up
on their arrival at £3O a-year wages, whilst farm
servants and artisans are in equal request. Such
is the scarcity of shepherds and herdsmen, that the
farmers are under the necessity of boiling down
their flocks for tallow ! They have timber in
abundance which they cannot cut down ; minerals
of immense value which they cannot get; abun-
dance, in short, of all things necessary for the wants
.of man, only requiring hands to raise and fashion
them for his use. The outlay of one quarter of the
amount which we devote every year for the main-
tenance of our able-bodied poor, for the. repression
and punishment of crime, for union workhouses
and prisons, penitentiaries and hospitals, would
place tens of thousands in the permanent possession
.of comfort, and on the road to independence, if not
even of affluence. It would convert thousands of
-these suffering wratcbes, now fed at our cost in
idleness, or snatching the bread put of each other's
mouths, in the eagerness of their competition for
employment, in the position of employers of their
ellow-countrymen's labour at home, and consumers
of the fabrics of the British manufacturer. Let
such an effort be made by the nation—it would
only be a temporary sacrifice—and we should
shortly see a happy, a contented, and an employed
people in our own land; whilst every wind from
our distant colonies would waft us the blessings of
those grateful thousands whom we had assisted in
throwing off their poverty, and enabled to tread, if
not their own, still a kindred soil, with the proud
step of freemen.
That we are not exaggerating the prospects which
Australia affords to the industrious settler, we pro-
pose to show by the following extract from the
1 etter of a gentleman there, who has addressed his
fellow-countrymen at home through the pages of
Simmonds' Colonial Magazine for March last :

" The emigrants who are most certain of immediate
success in South Australia arc the able-bodied labourers,
who are industrious enough to work hard for a season,
and steady enough to hoard, instead of squandering that
for which they toil. The man who does so, will, in the
course of a very few years, pass over from the ranks of
the employed to those of the employer. This is no day-
dream; but a result, which, under mine own eyes, has
followed the noble exertions of hundreds in this free
colony, who have converted their labour capital into land,
and their money capital into cattle or corn. Many men
who landed here without a shilling, and that too but a
very few years ago, are, at the moment I write, happily
settled on their own farms, and surrounded with plenty.
It will naturally be asked, ' How was this accomplished ?'
I will tell you. Suppose you are the father of a family,
and have three stout, hearty sons, willing and able to
work, (although people here do not generally work so
hard as in the slave-driven labour market of the three
kingdoms.) The wages, which, if you hired yourselves
for a year, you could earn, would average £3O each, be-
sides your victuals; making a sum of £l2O between the
four. This sum is the very lowest which you could cal-
culate upon earning in fixed places of employment ; but,
i f you could hit the seasons, you would earn, in all pro-
bability, double that amount. What I mean by hitting
the seasons' is this :—The sheepshearing and sheepwash-
i ng season commences about September, and lasts about
two months, during which time experienced shearers
often return to town with from £2O to £3O; but, alas
too often to spend it, or rather throw it away in dissi-
pation in a single week, with all the proverbial reckless-
ness of a sailor after a cruise, instead of prudently depo-
siting it in the Savings Bank, or laying it out safely and
to great a.lvantage, for which there is every opportunity,
as many have found to their permanent benefit and satis-
faction. At the time of the bay harvest it is by no means
unusual for good hands to earn, by the job, 15s. per day.
After tie; hay harvest is over, then comes on the grain
harvest, during which experienced labourers caw earn a
similar sum; and, when that is at an end, the collecting
of gum, threshing, carting, &c., follow in the wake. In
the interior there is no lack of employment, either at the
mines, where 255. per week can be reckoned upon, as
permanent weekly wages, even by men who are not prpc-
tical miners •, but, in general, a great deal more has been
earned by the job,' or by what they call ton-work, tut-
work, or tribute. When not employed at home, you
may, with your neighbours and others, be driving your
drays to and from the mines, the usual earnings, for a
team of six or eight bullocks, averaging £3 3s. per week.
And, if you have a wife and daughters, they may be busy
too; for butter, eggs, cheese, poultry, and every descrip-
tion of vegetable, find a ready market. The honest,
sober, and industrious man's best method of turning his
labour to profitable account, he will soon find out in this
province; but, as I have said before, £l2O is the least a
man and three sturdy sons ought to calculate upon as a
year's earnings in money. Deducting from this £5 each
for clothes, you would have a capital of .-Cl6O in the first
year. This being accomplished, you can. if you choose,
purchase here and there, within some few miles of the
city, rich, beautiful land, not surpassed by any other in
the world for fertility, at the rate of £1 per acre, although
considerable portions of land can now only be obtained
at some distance from Adelaide; and, when once you get
an eighty-acre section, the road to wealth is smooth be-
fore you. With the surplus £2O two of you can com-
mence fencing and two may be still for the next year
hired out as I have described, with the remaining two
occasionally so employed. The climate is so mild, that,
until you can afford it, there is not much necessity for
anything better than a slab-hut, which you can build
yourselves with your own timber; and, let me tell you,
in similar dwellings, men, who were nursed in the lap of
luxury, have been, and are now, living happy and con-
tented, because they are either earning an independent
livelihood, or, as is the case in many instances, making
an independent fortune. Working oxen and a dray, a
plough and harrows, follow during the next year ; and
seed wheat, samples of which in England have been de-
clared the finest produced in any part of the world, can
be purchased at from 35. 6d. to 4s. per bushel, or 325. a
quarter. So that you will observe the only thing which
is requisite to make you an independent farmer on your
own land, a respectable yeoman of the csuntry which I
invite you to adopt, is, as I have before said, to be
industrious enough to work hard for a season, and steady
enough to lay by that for which you have toiled. Then
do you begin to reap the fruits of your industry, and, in
a very short space of time, you may find yourself as in-
- dependent as a 'lord of the manor.'
Many an honest yeoman and farmer there is at
this moment throughout Great Britain, pondering
anxiously what he is to do with his stalwart sons and
daughters, for whose support, in his own pursuits,
his property has become too small; hesitating into
what other branch of industry they can be drafted,
where all are overcrowded ; by whom the prospect
here presented might be grasped at with avidity.
Many a rural parish, which has labour in burthen-
some superfluity, might be tempted to relieve
themselves from that superfluity; to tax themselves
temporarily for the achievement of a permanent
good. There might he even parochial machinery
brought into operation, by which all communities
of friends and relatives, the enterprising young