Page:The three colonies of Australia.djvu/419

Rh that, by the 9th Geo. IV., cap. 83, all indentures of this sort are expressly exempt from the stamp duty; and to make this exception the more certain, a clause to the like effect will be introduced into the legislative measure which will be required to carry out these recommendations. Your committee having learnt by advices lately received from England, that there are large numbers of boys and girls of good character, of thirteen years of age and upwards, in the orphan schools and other eleemosynary establishments of the United Kingdom, towards whose emigration to this colony the guardians and other managers of such establishments would contribute largely out of parochial or other funds,—with a view as well to the relief of such establishments from the cost of their maintenance, as to the advantageous settlement of the apprentices themselves in the colony, recommend that whenever any such boys or girls are under indenture to the immigration agent of this colony for the time being, to serve an apprenticeship of four years, the two first for wages at the rate of £5 a year, and the two last for wages at the rate of £10 a year, a contribution of at a rate not exceeding £8 for statute adults, should be made towards their passage-money from the territorial revenue, and be repaid by the employer at the time the apprentice is indented to him by the immigration agent, provided the remainder of their passage-money and their outfit be contributed by the guardians or other managers of any such institutions at home. The emigrants of the enumerated classes, and to whom your committee recommend that passages should be furnished under the foregoing stipulations as to indenture and repayment, are as follows:—

No payment will be required for the wives of persons of the above classes, or any of their children who may be under the age of 14 years; all children above that age must be paid for as statute adults.

Your committee, in thus recommending a complete alteration in the present bounty system, feel that a new era has arisen in the whole of the colonies forming the Australian group, which renders them the most eligible of all the countries in the globe as a field for immigration, not from the United Kingdom alone but from all Europe; that the necessity, therefore, which has hitherto existed to hold out extraordinary inducements to intending emigrants to select these colonies as a future home, has entirely ceased; that all future immigration therefore should, if its cost be not in the first instance defrayed out of the funds of the immigrants themselves, be at least for the most part of a self-supporting character, so as to relieve that branch of our public revenue which has hitherto been almost exclusively devoted to this