Gentlemen Emigrants.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 859, 17 August 1888, Page 10

Gentlemen Emigrants.

Macmillan’s Magazine. The vicar of Bumbletown Magna has four hundred pounds a year, no private means, and eight children, four boys and four girls. The former must be educated up to a certain point to test their capacities for securing the prizes of life. The elder justifies the test and shows possibilities of exhibitions and fellowships. Tho second may have a special turn for mechanics, or the vicar may exhaust his interest in getting him into a bank. For the two, strong, healthy, well brought up lads, there is no visible career whatever. It is not their fault. They are not dull, but, to use a common expression of the bewildered parent, ‘ books are not their line.’ They are upon the whole as fine young fellows ub you wish to come across, simple and manly, with nothing in common with the cover-coated, cigarette-suckiog, bar-room-haunting style of youth they might become after a year or two of idleness in this country. They have practically no alterna. tive but emigration. It is true that Diek and Tom work as hard or harder than agricultural labourers in this country, but then Farmer Cornstalk, who has a farm worth two thousand pounds and twice as much in the bank besides, works equally hard. English people who look upon the cleaning out of pigstyes as a horrible degradation, but riding on a mowing-machine a performance not unworthy of a gentleman, would be regarded by an American farmer as showing signs of a softening of the brain, Tho perfect

republicanism of the farming community beyond the Atlantic, which so often irritates the English Gentleman Emigrant of capital who becomes a proprietor, stands in good stead those who have to work for others. The latter at any rate have no material anxieties. They may go within certain limits almost where they choose, and make certain of food and lodging and sufficient wage. If their lot is cast among a class socially lower than that in which they were born, it is proportionately kinder-hearted and less likely to leave them in the lurch in case of unforeseen misfortune. If the physical work is hard, there is a large proportion of English youth to whom physics 1 toil is infinitely preferable to mental labour and deprivation from fresh air. Sometimes this is only fancy* and a 3'outhful exouse to be rid of books, but often it is perfectly genuine and will stand the test of years. Social sentiment is deeply adverse to such a line of life, but after all wbat a trifling thing is this when placed upon the scales with bread and butter and an average degree of happiness. If there are more gentlemen, to use an ambiguous phrase, brought into tho world thau can be maintained in a soft-handed and black-ooated state, demand and supply must assert themselves. For the youth who has no intellectual hankerings and whose chief delight is in his physical powers, one can imagine many a worse fate than that he should be absorbed into that immense and industrious class who till the soii of the American continent. He will be none the worse for his gentle rearing if he have tact and sense. ‘ Even if he lose his superficial graces and become almost unrecognisable in the course of years from the ordinary working farmer of the country of his adoption, what harm is it? Is there any special happiness in this life, or extra chance of it in tho next, in possessing certain tricks of manner and speech that indicate neither virtue, industry, hoDesty, nor even education iu its comforting sense ? For what do young men of this kind, whose education has been to them simply a bore and its result a hatred of books, lose by such a life, if they are otherwise happy, healthy and industrious ? After working for many years like this, ‘ What then ?’ some people may say. The query is natural, aud not easily answered. But we are not talking of men who might have risen to be Queen’s Counsel, or headmasters, or canons, nor even of those who could have got small posts in banks or offices, though in such cases the ‘ What then ?’ might with almost equal justice be asked. This disoussiou applies only to those who have no alternative but emigration, and no choice but physical labour. The future iu such cases it is true holds out nothing definite but a livelihood. If Dick or Tom eventuully end in marrying some decant farmer’s daughter and secure thereby, according to local custom, a permanent lodgment in the family homestead and a greater or less share in the family acres, the question is happily settled. Such a fate, no doubt, would be dreadful to the notions of many excellent people who estimate happiness by the rungs in the ladder of social competition. Striking this issue, however, out of our reckoning, a vast and new couutry holds out opportunities that the industrious, intelligent, and experienced young man sooner or later will be able to take hold of, and so raise himself into something more materially prosperous thau a ‘ hired man.’