THE NATIONAL IMMIGRATION SCHEME.

Otago Witness, Issue 986, 22 October 1870, Page 11

THE NATIONAL IMMIGRATION SCHEME.

Canadian experience of Government Immigration schemes ap<jpar* to be anything but favourable. The Melbourne Daily Telegraph applies it to our own Government schemes in the following style : — Mr Vogel, the Treasurer of New Zealand, and the author of the National I m migration scheme about to be tested there, Bees, we may hope, the Canadian papers, because Canada has recently been the scene of National Emigration schemes, »n<i the Press gives some curious particulars ot' Ihe result. Mr Vogel expects the twenty or thirty thousand people he is to introduce per annum will take twelve months' employ men n on the railways at 30a per week, and then settle down into industrious producers. He will have, we are afraid, to get a very different class of men from the individuals England has generously shipped to Canada. The Toronto Globe describes the immigration sheds as being thronged with " lazy characters," who will not accept a job at a reasonable rate of remuneration, but prefer to spend their time in loafing. Our contemporary doubts very much whether Government immigrants are the right men to develope the resources of a colony, and is positive that they will lower the moral tone of the community. Canada, indeed, appears to want what Victoria wants — namely, active and enterprising men, gifted with a facility of resources ; men of willing hands, temperate habits, and l.r.ive hearts, coming here to found horne s*,5 *, rather than make fortunes. Arid these are the men England is no way inclined to part with. They are figh which couie not within the meshes of any Government charity net, no matter with what care it may be spread. The immigrants Mr Vogel is sure to get, and whom Mr Verdon would get if he became a fisher of men, are the failures of the community, of whom Canada has sickened already. And Mr Vogel, and others than Mr Vogel— the whole Vogel family — may learn from Canada that an idle, dirty, and loafing man is not made industrious and capable of supportingl himself by simply transporting him across an ocean. The truest colonists the world has ever seen were the Pilgrim Fathers, who went to se.tfcle the land, to make the barren places rrj'rice and the wilderness to blossom, and were neither driven from home by poor-house guardians, nor allured by a gold fever. The nearer a colony can get to that type of settlers the better— the less it will want with Government agents, and the more settlers it will be prepared to take.

The Bruce Herald's " Peripatetic Jotter" has come to giief, having broken the middle finger of his ri^ht hrmd in endeavouring to manage his horee, which had fallen over a landslip in Danay's Pass.