A REMEDY FOR THE POOR-RATES.
A SOCIETY for thepurpose of promoting Colonization, on the princi- ples unfolded in the Letter from Sydney, is, we are happy to under- stand, about to be established.
No one who looks at the English poor-rates can doubt that England is over-peopled,—in other words, that England contains many la- bourers for whom there is no profitable employment : no one who looks at the crowds of labourers whom Ireland sends to swell the English labour-market, overcrowded as that is with native compe- titors for employment, can doubt that Ireland is oppressed with a similar redundancy in a still greater degree. On the other hand, the high rates of wages in many of our Colonies prove that in them there is a scarcity of labourers. The object of the "Emigration Society" is to supply, without expense, the deficiency of the Colonies from the redundancy of the Mother Country—to check the undue increase of our population—to enrich our Colonies—and to open up avenues to wealth in other countries to those who in this can serve but to swell the tide of pauperism that is rising around us: To relieve the country from an excess of population, it is not suffi- cient to remove the actual surplus at any given moment. Unless the rate of increase be checked, nothing is done. This can be effected only by selecting the colonists from the young. About 400,000 persons, it is computed, reach the age of puberty yearly in Britain. To re- move a fourth of these, would do more towards checking the rate at which our population advances, than to remove eight times as many :! without regard to this principle of selection. In new countries, where land may be had in unlimited quantities for nothing, capital increases slowly, because the advantages of con- centration are lost. To preserve these advantages as far as possible, without crowding the population so much as to render wages low, e is the great problem in colonial legislation ; and it is to be solved only by regulatIng the amount of fend taken into cultivation front time to time, by the increase of capital in the same period. This, e Government has the power of doing. The proposed increase of la- bourers will lead to an immediate increase of capital—that increase of capital to a demand for fresh land. Let the new land be sold at a reasonable price. That price will defray the expenses of emigration. The expense of removing each person to Canada, South Africa, and Australasia, would be, on an average, 10/. ;—so that 50,000 couples could be annually removed for less than one-seventh of the amount of our preeent poor-rates. - If Government should patronize this plan, it is the intention of the Society, as soon as the sale of waste lands shall have realized a fund, to provide free passages for young people who may be willing to emi- grate, and for all orphans and destitute children for whose emigration t. parishes or individuals may he willing to pay 10/. For these the Society will undertake to provide empkyment in the Colonies. Of the absolute and speedy success of a plan founded on principles so admirable, we cannot permit ourselves to doubt ; and if it shall succeed according to our anticipations, the man in Whose benevolence and sagacity the plan had its origin, will be entitled, we think, to claim no mean rank among the benefactors of his species.
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