SELF-SUPPORTING EMIGRATION.
(To TES EDITOR OF TRH SPECTATOR:1 SLR,—Allow me through your columns to make a suggestion to the East End Emigration and Relief Society.
It would appear: from a letter of Mr. Standish Haly, published a few months ago, I believe, in the Times of the 3rd January, that a laudable discrimination is being exercised by the Emigration Committee in selecting candidates for emigration. Trained labour, the most valuable article that can be exported to a colony, and not professional pauperism, the most deadly gift that can be made to a young community that has no accumulated capital, and that consumes on the morrow the produce of yesterday, is what the Committee proposes to send out. Now, if this object is conscientiously carried out and care is taken to adapt the article exported to the demand of the importing colony, it can be safely predicted that the emigrants in their new homes will find themselves in the receipt of wages which will leave a margin over their dally requirements for rent, clothing, food, and such provision for the future as is expressed by the weekly subscription to a benefit society.
My suggestion is that the attempt should be made to mortgage this margin to the extent required to pay for the emigrant's passage and for his sustenance until he is fairly launched in his new field of employment.
The objects gained by this scheme would be twofold : first, a self-feeding emigration fund would be provided, by which, for every emigrant landed in Australia, another emigrant could be furnished in England with the means of following him. Secondly, the individual emigrant would be saved from the moral deterioration which every form of almsgiviug involves, and in a number of cases a spur to increased exertion, and that most efficient of all moral agencies, a direct and pressing motive to save, would probably be afforded.
To carry out the scheme, a very simple machinery would suffice. All that would be required would be that the society should appoint an agent, or what would be better still, start an affiliated society in the colony to which the emigrants are sent. Before the emigrant left England the society should calculate the exact amount incurred, or to be incurred, on his behalf, and the emigrant should sign a bond by which he undertook to become personally liable for the amount on his landing in the colony. The debts thus contracted would be made over to the agent or the affiliated society in the colony, who would, according to the circumstances of each case, the rate of wages, price of provisions, &c., make arrangements for the repayment of the debt by instalments over a longer or shorter period, a uniform rate of interest being in the meanwhile charged. E.y., suppose that the cost to the society were £20, and that 4 per cent. were the rate of interest charged, then an annual payment of 6 per cent., or 24s. (less than 6d, a week), would clear the emigrant in 28 years ; 8 per cent., or 32s. a year (about Td. a week), would clear him in about 18 years ; 10 per cent., or 40s. a year, in 13 years; 20 per cent., or about Is. 9d. a week, in less than 6 years ; and so on.
Is it chimerical to suppose that these weekly payments are beyond the reach of bond fide labouring men and mechanics according to the rates of wages quoted in colonial newspapers?
The agent or affiliated society would have to keep an exact register of each emigrant, the locality in which he was employed, the wages he was earning, the exact state of his account at the end of each year, &c.
The character of the society would afford sufficient guarantee to the individual emigrant that he can no risk of vexatious proceedings being taken against him, and that every facility would be granted to him for the liquidation of his debt. Ou the other hand, the bond fide nature of the debt would enable the society to take legal measures for its recovery in cases like that of Miss Coutta's Ayrshire weavers, in which not the means of repaying but the will to do so was wanting.
Apart from the good which the society might actually accomplish, its efforts in the direction indicated and the statistics it might collect would be of the greatest use in preparing the way towards that which I am sanguine enough to believe will prove the true solution of the problem of emigration, viz., the application to emigration of the principle of co-operation.
The triumphant results yielded by the Schultze-Delitsch cooperative credit banks in Germany have once for all solved one at least of the many problems connected with capital and labour by practically demonstrating that if the right conditions are found, co-operated labour, or labour in a corporate capacity, can be pawned as easily as any other valuable commodity, i.e., that given a certain collective amount of muscular power and mechanical skill, with certain conditions of stability and with collective responsibility, capitalists can be found to advance money upon it in the way of business, and not of philanthropy, exactly as they would make advances on the tools wielded by that power and by that skill. At the present moment millions of thalers are being yearly advanced in Germany on this kind of security at the market rate of interest.
The adaptation of this principle to emigration, i.e., the settingforth of corporations of emigrants collectively responsible for the capital required to defray the coats of their voyage, and of their start in the colony, would of course involve special difficulties and complications, which it would probably be a hopeless task to attempt to surmount, until the spirit of co-operation and of indivi dual and collective responsibility has developed itself more than it
has done at present, but the principle should be kept in view. When we ponder over the fact of the millions of pounds sterling sent over by Irish emigrants to their kinsfolk from the United States, we cannot fail to see that the surplus of earnings over requirements in the new country, where labour is dear, and the surplus of credit in the old country, where capital is cheap, are the two forces that should be combined to establish that steady, normal, and regular current of emigration which is required in the interest of the Old World and the New.
Philanthropists could not better atone for the mischief which their contempt of economical laws daily inflicts upon society than by making themselves the pioneers of an important economical development like that above indicated, and the East End Emigration Society appears singularly well fitted for the task of making a first experiment.
The were publication after two or three years of the Registers I propose should be kept by the colonial agent would furnish an amount of bond fide information in regard to the objects proposed, such as the demands of the labour market at the antipodes, the average earnings of different kinds of labour, the difference between money wages and wages as measured by the cost of the labourer's requirements, the number of defaulters, &c., which would be of invaluable use towards estimating the possible risks of lending money to emigrants in the way of business.—I am,
Sir, &c., It. B. D. M.
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