Page:Two speeches of Robert R. Torrens, Esq., M.P., on emigration, and the colonies.djvu/8

4 wished it were in his power to say confidently there were—reasons for believing this calamitous distress to be but temporary as regarded the condition of the artizan class; but as regarded the agricultural labourer, the case throughout a great part of the country was undoubtedly chronic. When there was employment for two there were three seeking for it, and by this competition wages were kept at a scale which barely sufficed to supply food, clothing, and lodging essential to sustain a single man in vigor. In the case of the married labourer, therefore, that amount of food must be curtailed that the wife and children might be clothed and not starve. Lassitude and depression, induced by insufficient sustenance, created a craving for ardent spirits to arouse the system, or for the drugged beer of the pot-house to stupify [sic] and deaden the sense of suffering. The dwelling of the labourer seldom afforded sufficient accommodation to admit of separation of the sexes and observance of the ordinary decencies of civilized life. The conditions of such an existence were inconsistent with moral or intellectual culture—and the labour of a man thus enfeebled in body and almost brutalized in mind was dear even at the paltry wages paid for it. Disease and premature decay induced by those causes incapacitated for labour at a comparatively early period of life; a result hastened by despair of being able to rescue himself and family from the downward track at foot of which the inevitable workhouse yawned to receive them. This was no exaggerated picture, but a true description of the state of things in certain districts, and its existence was a disgrace to the civilization and humanity of this wealthy nation. Happily it was confined to certain districts. Notably our Northern counties were free from that opprobrium, a circumstance which afforded absolute assurance that it was remediable by human agencies. But wherever this state of misery existed—whether the locality be rural or urban—whatever be the industry, whether agricultural or manufacturing—and whether the distress be temporary or chronic, the proximate cause was one and the same, excessive competition—competition induced by the existing disproportion between the number of labourers and the amount of employment afforded within the limits of these islands. Probably no one would be found to deny that the distress which they deplored would at once be alleviated if only it were possible to interpose Nova Scotia or New Zealand in the ocean space between Great Britain and Ireland, so that the labour and capital here in