Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/518

510 on ever so small a scale within the bounds of Lancashire or Cheshire without risk of being insulted. Poor-law guardians, millowners, organisers of relief, repressed all discussion of that remedy, or insisted on “keeping together” the whole host of operatives, or snubbed all applicants for servants or labourers to be employed in other counties, or threw out innuendoes against young women who went out under good guardianship to the colonies, or pressed the managers of such schemes to choose young thieves and disreputable girls for their protégées. From this extreme of reluctance a crowd of eager people have rushed into the other,—of eagerness to deport as many as possible of the sufferers, if not the whole mass. It really appears that, incredible as it may seem, there are persons passing for sane who propose the removal of the entire population of cotton operatives and their families! Though it is an understood fact that a very small number of destitute people in any society, necessarily cause a much larger number to be underfed, these daring philanthropists would throw hundreds of thousands of strangers on a sudden on the shores of new settlements which have had time only to provide barely for their own residents, and to invite a specified number, of fitting qualifications, to come and work and prosper as they themselves have done. This perilous precipitation is easily accounted for by the wayward tendencies of ardent and inexperienced minds. Those who were confident, last summer, that the manufacture would come all right in a few weeks, now insist that it is dead and gone for ever. The American cotton has not come in, and is not likely to come in,—being not only out of reach, but to a great extent destroyed or spoiled; and therefore these zealots give up the case altogether, though cotton is growing more and more largely in every producing country but North America, and though the glut in the world’s market is clearing off, and though cotton fabrics are as preferable as they ever were to other material for the greatest use of the greatest number; and though, as I may add, the manufacture at this moment shows abundant vitality in Lancashire itself. We need not dwell on this extravagant view. We may safely assure ourselves that the existence and prospects of the cotton manufacture are in no danger. For the present they are lowered and darkened: but, while cotton is growing, and mills are standing, and warehouses are emptying, and all nations are in need of cotton fabrics, it would be mere craziness or perverseness to doubt of a revival, more or less tardy; and we need not, therefore, sit down and cry that we cannot carry away a million of people in a hurry to the other side of the world. Several scores of thousands of operatives will be wanted at home before very long,—as indeed some tens of thousands are now. We have quite as much on our hands as we can manage in enabling those to emigrate whom the colonies can receive, and who are qualified to go.

I am not speaking of this desire to deport half Lancashire as a testimony in honour of emigration. Such a use of emigration is like the use of the broom to sweep flights of locusts into the fire in the plain, or into the river in the valley. The real testimony on behalf of emigration is on the part of those of us who thoroughly understand that any scheme of removal, or all together, must leave more hands idle and dependent in Lancashire than the cotton manufacture can employ for a long time to come. We help as many as we can to remove, because we believe that just so many are rescued from poverty and its pains, and because their departure somewhat lessens the pressure at home. There is no small difference between wanting to sweep our distressed operatives (as some want to sweep our criminals) out of sight, and striving to provide a real remedy for their calamity to a certain number of the sufferers, while lightening it to the country. We send away our emigrants, not as a nuisance or a distress, but as candidates for prosperity, and as citizens charged with upholding the honour and assisting the welfare of their country. There lies before me now a Queensland newspaper which strongly suggests the contrast between the two ways of leaving one’s country. The “Queensland Guardian” of Jan. 15th says that the emigrants arriving in consequence of recent efforts “sustain a character for virtue and honour surpassed by none who have preceded them This fact is of the highest importance to us as a people at the commencement of our career. Nothing will be well done unless we lay our foundations deep and sure in the purest morality.” No wonder that a colony which holds this faith is vehemently alarmed at the barest mention of the revival of transportation to any part of the Australian continent!

It is quite natural that excitable citizens at home who want to send away a million of people at once should be able to think of only one place to send them to. We accordingly hear so much from these zealots about Queensland, that it might seem as if they were unaware that there is any other destination for emigrants. It is very like the one idea of the Irish peasants,—that emigration means going to the United States. This sort of possession by an idea is very sad in both cases. It is a melancholy thing now, as it was a dozen years ago, to hear of thousands of small farmers and labourers sailing from Cork to New York,—to meet the lot which we know awaits them there:—to be made tools of for the hardest and dirtiest work, physical and political,—to die of malaria or of intemperance,—to grow fierce in competition with negro labourers, or fiercer and crueller as the creatures of the Slave Power. This has always been painful; and now there is the added horror that the soberest and best of them can hardly escape from the perils of the ports into the back country, but are seized upon for soldiers. It is miserable to know that Irishmen are fighting with Irishmen in a cause which is none of theirs, while their wives and children—too likely to be their widows and orphans—are dependent on the charity of a people among whom they are strangers. The priests at home understand all this. I learn that it is piteous to hear their remonstrances with the departing throng, to the last moment; and to see them pacing the shore when their flocks are gone, irritated and grieved and helpless. Their people say they are angry at losing their fees: they themselves say that they are mourning over souls sure to lapse from the Church, and over lives