Year: 1878

Et \ What is to be Done With the Great Mass

 of LaborinR Men Out of Employment.

 One of the most terribly significant incidents connected with the loss Of the Metropolis, was the fact that, one hour after the news sthat ..the ship had gone down arrived in Philadelphia, with all the exaggerated horrors of 9 first dispatch, the office of the Messrs. Collins was besieged with hundreds of hunger bitten. decent men, begging for the places of the drowned laborers. In New York city there have been over 2 thousand applicants at the agency for New South Wales, to be sent out as laborers and mechanics on the clipper ship starting this month for Sydney. E.

 These people represent but fraction of the great mass of unemployed poor in the cities men who are not paupers from inclination honest, industrious, frugal, in the majority of cases heads of families, who are out of work, and are ready to go to the. other side of the. globe, or to the forests of Brazil, to get work to keep their wives and children from starving. It is useless to ignore this miserable, gaunt fact, which stares us in the face at every corner. It is not to be dispelled any longer by soup houses on the one hand, organized pre- cautions against tramps on the other. We have had enough discussion on the relative advantages of occasional and organized charity. It is not charity that is wanted it is work, and the only work which offers now as @ relief to the suffer- ing in the cities is farming. How the unemployed mechanics and laborers have got through this Winter, God only lnows-they have been greatly helped by the mild weather. But when Spring has opened, what is then to be done The revival of business will be too slight to afford them any tangible help. Are they all to sink down permanently into tramps and paupers ? Or, in case of a revival of the labor troubles of last July, are we to keep them as reserve corps, ready, as then, to join, with terrible effect, the side of disorder, riot and rapine?

 Last September the New York Tribune from which we clip, called attention to the unemployed waste lands of the upper Southern States as being cheap, easy oi access and healthful. Those suggestions, as we have learned, have been fol lowed in several instances in the es' tablishment of colonies in these dis. tricts. We learn, too, that certain capi. talists in Pittsburg propose to open ur the wild region of the Cheat in West Virginia, and aid poor colonists in emi grating thither. They have solved the problem in the only way it can be solved ing by the thousands in New York an6 Philadelphia, while within twenty foul hours distance are hundreds and thou sands of acres of unbroken forests il Virginia and North Carolina, tenantee only by the bear, the wolf and the deer

 with rich soil, and climate above al malarious influences, and vast resources of timber, coal and iron. If these me1 will go to Brazil and Australia at tht risk of such perils as those which shock ed the country, they will go to the nex State if the way is made clear to them Is it cheaper to help them, as the Pitts burgers are doing. or to feed them a home, either as paupers or prisoners If intelligent mechanics would co-ope rate, they would obtain the respect ane aid of capitalists. The und@takine would pay both in the end. If anything of the kind is to be done, February if the time to organize. A man cannot begin farming in the middle of summer It is not easy work, but it is work, and the chance for life. We confess we see very little chance elsewhere. rs.s