New Zealand Times. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1874.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 4287, 16 December 1874, Page 2

New Zealand Times. WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 16, 1874.

Tjie detailed news which wo received by the San Francisco mail bore out our expressed opinion that there was very considerable exaggeration in the telegrams in regard to the probable emigration of English farm laborers to the Valley of the Mississippi. At the same time, the truth is startling enough. The removal of five thousand farm laborers, with their belongings, is not an unimportant event. Hitherto only a percentage of emigrants were from the rural counties, the bulk being made npof persons who earned a precarious livelihood about large towns, or who were sent for by their relatives. But now, owing to the lowrate of wages and the combination of farmers, as well as to the newly kindled spiritof independence which recent events have evoked, agricultural laborers are no longer fixtures, attached to the soil, but are ready to go to any new country where there is a reasonable promise of improving their condition. Five thousand farm laborers are to be sent to the Valley of the Mississippi, in addition to the many thousands of British people who voluntarily expatriate themselves to the United States and Canada, and the multitudes who, fortunately for themselves, come to the Australian colonies and New Zealand. No wonder, therefore, that British statesmen are taking thought regarding this movement. It is unlike the migration of the tribes of the Old World, because it is the result of individual, and not of national, thought. It promotes commerce and encourages industry, instead of destroying both. Men seek change for their own personal benefit ; and instead of inducing a great degree of human misery, the outflow of population from Europe to the sparsely-peopled places of the earth tends to increase the sum total of human happiness. But while all this is going on, the dispute between capital and labor is being waged with as keen a relish as ever. Capital is inexorable. It knows no diminution, as yet, in its purchasable agents, and goes on accumulating profits ; labor, on the other hand, feels itself growing stronger daily, and encourages emigration as the one means of equalising the contest with capital. But so constant has been the drain on labor by emigration, and so perfect are the competing agencies for promoting emigration, that capital has at last become alarmed. It wants cheap labor. It delights in large profits and quick returns ; but these are certain to bo things of the past unless the Government interferes, and stops emigration. But herein lies the whole difficulty. Wo are quite prepared to learn that the Conservatives mean to devise a plan whereby the British hind will bo

detained in the country for the benefit of 1 ‘ his superiors.” It does not, however, follow that the British hind will accept the new gospel of labor and duty, promulgated by the “ powers that be,” whoever may have “ordained” the “powers aforesaid. On the contrary; men like Mr. Holloway, who have of the new and better life in the colonies, where men may call their souls thoir own, will stir up their fellows in England, and induce them to flee to countries which not only promise homes for the industrious, but which fail not to realise their promise. A perusal of our exchanges by the San Francisco mail induces the belief that the majority of the respectable classes in England do not realise the gravity of the situation. They are discussing questions of abstract principle when the most practical questions are in course of solution under their eyes. By and by they will doubtless awake to the importance of the facts which they now superciliously ignore ; but until then we fear they will let the producing population —the hewers of wood and drawers of water—slip through their fingers. Under these circumstances, it is the bounden duty of all who have the means of influencing the tide of emigration to turn it as fully as possible upon this colony.