The Australian gold and labour question is assuming a magni-
tude and an urgency almost unknown to Colonial subjects. The present week has witnessed the arrival of reports so alarming as to raise the most gloomy apprehensions. But we are driven back to remember, that, within the last month or two, there has been an extraordinary alternation of exaggerated reports and of the qua-
lifying truth from different parts of Australia. We are just now in the receipt of the secondary reports, and there is a cor- responding panic. " Ideraide, Vass Diemen's-land,. ko.„ are fled becoming depopulated ' ini the reprta througb Port Phillip; bid the latest certain and direst accolade 'rove that previoua repoats of exactly the same kind had been amch exaggerated: The are central and cardinal fact is, that in the middle of January some fifteen thousand persons were collected in the principal gold-dig- gings ; that some of them at least were collecting ten or twenty pounds weight of gold in a day ; that a labourer in that region was demanding wages of one pound sterling a day; and that people of all classes continued to flock to that quarter. It needs no exact statistics to understand the condition of the other colonies : it is only surprising that the abstraction of labour has not been more sudden and complete. The wool-crop and grain-harvest of the Australian year, represented by our winter season, had been, with some deductions, secured ; but the continued and rapid abstraction of labour had filled the capitalists and proprietors of Australia with the most reasonable and urgent apprehensions re- speeting the wool-crop and harvest of the ensuing season—con- temporaneous, the English reader will remember, with our winter. The alarm has communicated itself to the manufacturers of York- shire and our cloth-districts ; and inasmuch as the Australians are the largest proportionate consumers of our manufactures, the alarm has become general in all who feel even a derivative interest in Australian commeree. This feeling is exemplified by the journals of all classes and politics ; who are joining in the clamorous demand for a supply of labour to fill up le vacancy: Sug- gestions are poured forth in all quarters ; the main idea being a large and prompt emigration, which, to be of any use, ought to leave this country within six weeks. Amongst the most experienced saggesters is Mr. E. G. Wakefield, the real founder of the South Australian and New Zealand Colo- nies, and originator of the new regime in Canada. Mr. Wakefield's suggestion, made prospectively in October last, is that the promptest rescue of Australia would be an importation of Chinese ' slaves " : but for his explanation of that startling proposal we must refer the reader to his letter in a subsequent "page.* The idea of a Chinese labour importation has been adopted this week by the faithful organ of the late and perhaps we may say of the next Government, the Globe. Meanwhile, Government has gradu- ally been. stirred up ; those English Yankees, the Yorkshire manu- facturers, having applied the "long pole" with the most effect. -Under such inspirations, the official ideas are, to send out a ship,— which will have the honour of firing salutes after the deserters. whose movements will be chronicled in the fashionable departures of Sydney ; to despatch six hundred troops,—whose discrimination between the legitimate fourpence a day of barrack savings, and the indefinite pounds sterling a day of Ballarat diggings, a mili- tary correspondent, Captain Bellaire, so critically describes; t and to send. out emigrants, to the amount of 2400 a month—at least half of them, if we understand Lord Derby, women ! The utmost confusion, however, hangs over the facts and necessities of the case, which we have endeavoured to make more clear in a separate paper. Meanwhile, Government has left itself barely six weeks to arrive at a competent understanding of the matter, to screw up its resolution. to the working point, and to send out the needful supply of labour in, time for the season which begins with. our winter.
• See Mr. Wakefield's second letter on the "Dangerous Condition of the Australias and New Zealand," at page 491. t See page 492..
