AN OVER-CROWDED PROFESSION.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 3321, 23 November 1883, Page 2

AN OVER-CROWDED PROFESSION.

Every vocation is ovcr-erowded in these days, but perhaps the most overcrowded of all are the lower ranks of business and “ literature.” The man with a little general and no special education, the “good penman,” is a drug in the market, and that as much, or even more, in the Now World than in the Old. The “ New York Herald ” gives some perfectly appalling statistics on this head, asserting on good authority that there are “ five thousand men now looking for employment as book-keepers" in New York. These men, wo are told, “though they could work at a hundred different things,” if they had a mind to, “ will persist in cither keeping books or keeping idle,” and that though the average wage of a book-keeper is not above 15 to 18doIs a week. The aversion to directly productive employments, and the increasing inclination to take some form or other of trading is all the more alarming at a time when the tendency of competition distinctly is to reduce the legitimate profits of the work of distribution, and to the number of persons who can get a living by it. That being the case, says a Home paper, there is nothing for these who will not or cannot take to productive work but to either see themselves reduced to miserable pittances, or, if they are lucky and enterprising, to have recourse, whether as lawyers, brokers, agents, or what not, to some form or other of that jobbing or “ financing,” the making of something out of nothing at the cost of the producers, the developement of which is an increasing post of modern society.