J. F. Boyd

“ Gladstone overlooked the truth that the value of all manufactures is (theoretically) the sum of the labour expended in obtaining and manipulating raw material in itself valueless. Were the goods our customers did not buy from us such as must have been extracted from British soil, then not less than one hundred and sixty million pounds are lost to British pockets. Manufacturers, workmen, tradesmen, carriers, middlemen, are poorer by that stupendous total, enough to ruin a third rate nation, to impoverish sensibly and severely try us. ”

“ For, of course, every individual in Great Britain, be the population twenty millions or thirty millions, has to be fed somehow. And owing to this necessity we are rapidly sinking into national and personal poverty because nothing is done or attempted, by legislators and statesmen, in order to preserve a reasonable proportion between the people and the land they live on. Had we no colonies it would be another matter. The truth of the controversy respecting imports and exports lies here. ”

“ Bright, amid the present glut, boast that the working man today is better paid and works shorter time than his father? Wages are higher here than elsewhere, partly because, owing to over-population, rents, meat, and vegetables have doubled in price. Until the workman can live cheaply our natural manufacturing advantages are neutralized; thus a vast emigration is calculated to largely reduce prime cost of home productions. Besides, what the great and the small manufacturers of England ask for before aught else is, not cheaper labour, but, new markets. ”

“ Crime and, finally, catastrophe, unfailingly scourge the community whose governors neglect or forget the most serious business of rulers, which is, to provide, not politics but, bread and butter for their people. ”

“ Keeping in mind these leading principles one can easily understand that a pauper industrious peasant landing in the New World adds £200 to American wealth, while at the same time his departure with wife and children from crowded, sterile Kerry, as things are, might, by the cessation of their drafts upon the sum of Irish products for the wherewithal to live, effectively add fully as much or more to the sum of wealth in Ireland, which they help to consume if they stay, and to which their labour can add nothing. ”

“ The emigration note vibrates in the air, and thrills the hearts of our people who have had convincing demonstration during these last ten years while party struggles have principally absorbed the energies of their public men, that the grandest of modern States, the most flourishing, the most peaceful and peaceable, has attained its astonishing prosperity, has acquired its incredible riches, mainly through emigration ”

“ The other two-thirds appear to be fully as many (at the outside) as the resources of our soil can maintain, under present conditions, in tolerable comfort, and those who remained must, accordingly, be benefited to a degree not easily exaggerated.
Of my State Directed Colonization the basis is, organized scientific pursuit of that most venerable of handicrafts whereof it has been finely said: "The first condition of social welfare is the peaceful and fruitful cultivation of the soil. Agriculture comes before commerce and the arts of life; for by agriculture men live. ”

“ Enough has, perhaps, been said by way of demonstrating necessity for a safety-valve that prescient statesmanship would have set at work forty years ago, thereby preventing evils that can hardly be cured. I contend that— (1) the British people must, like the Japanese, in the long run subsist upon the total sum of products, in every kind, of labour exercised, and savings, within their islands. (2) Our unparalleled population has far outstripped the inherent powers to sustain, of the small territory known as Great Britain. ”

“ The bread of life springs from the earth, and society rises up from the furrow. The scattered homes of those who possess it and till it gather into villages and hamlets, and grow into towns and cities, with all their manifold industries and duties and laws in the unity of a commonwealth. ”

“ We are habituated to its exclusiveness, and, no doubt, custom in England is a power; but let some event suddenly occur which makes a nation feel or think, and the whole thing might vanish like a dream. ”

“ The latter impoverishes one family, or at any rate takes from them what they will if possible take from somebody else, and if he spends the acquired increment of rent by importing cigars, champagne, turtle, and pine-apple for himself, or more expensive silk dresses for his wife, society is worse off; if, on the other hand, he is wise enough rightly to distribute it, society does not necessarily gain anything. ”

“ In order to make good the drain on our agricultural population, an essential part of the scheme must be the formation, under some proper system, of large or small training-farms at suitable points throughout the three kingdoms. To these places might be drafted all lads from orphanages, street youths from our great cities, men who hang about the streets picking up a precarious livelihood, and the like, to learn farm-work—the natural occupation of a great majority of mankind. ”

“ Shortly before the inauguration of free trade, on April 6, 1843, Mr. Charles Buller, in the House of Commons, proposed the following motion—"that an humble address be presented to her Majesty praying that she will take into her most gracious consideration the means by which extensive and systematic colonization may be most effectually rendered available for augmenting the resources of her Majesty's Empire; giving additional employment to capital and labour, both in the United Kingdom and in the colonies, and thereby bettering the condition of her people." ”

“ And, whatever may have been the true state of matters in 1840—1843, with regard to the problems of population, production, and emigration, how, taking a candid review of all the facts and prospects, can it be possible at this epoch to provide for the fresh mouths we know must be fed in the years to come, otherwise than by reducing the numbers of the people under some 'comprehensive scheme of emigration'? ”

“ I have been told the emigrant once in Canada, not troubling himself to fulfil engagements contracted with the Colonization Commission, would, as men usually do, study his interest; and so make tracks for the best paid employment he could get. This is a short-sighted view. The majority of men in any station of life naturally try to fulfil engagements when they can do so, and there is no over-whelming inducement to the contrary ”

“ The work can evidently only be undertaken on any effectual scale by the State, for the very phrase "surplus population". implies not surplus capital but surplus labour. Those whom it is desirable to remove are such as are willing to go, who would usually be persons without resources beyond their industry, without settled occupation at' home, which in itself inclines a man to stay and let well alone. ”

“ A true economist must perceive the simpler cheaper plan, and the best for England ultimately, would be to send the people to sources of the food supplies. Mr. Bright did not notice that the census grew slowly, or not at all, in 1840, while it grows now at the rate of over a thousand per day, any more than did he suggest how the fresh mouths so fast arriving are to be fed in the years to come. ”

“ Bright—who, fortunately for its prospects, has now retired from any active interference in matters like this—was always an enemy of what he called the "nostrum and panacea of emigration." Mr. Bright naturally wished to protect the large employers whose interests may seem bound up with surplusage in the labour market. Yet do we not see greater prosperity, more freedom from competition in trades where workpeople are well paid than in others where they are badly paid? ”

“ This being so it has, unhappily, come to be thought expedient in densely peopled States possessing ancient civilizations and corruptions, wherein production is thoroughly developed, to impede in some way natural fulfilment of the primary Divine law—"increase and multiply"—whence scandals of Asiatic infanticide and European challenges of the wisdom and providence of God; vicious attempts to preserve by violent means the due proportions, seeking always justification or excuse in the teachings of experience that nature has set limits to production. ”

“ It is impossible to catalogue with exactness all the positions that will be necessarily created, and must be filled—greatly to the advantage of the mother-country considered as one community, and to separate families whose heads are nowadays in so many instances thoroughly perplexed to know what is to be done with their young men. My rapid sketch, however, shows that this system of colonization will find legitimate permanent occupation for much more than mere bone and sinew. Brains are indispensable. ”

“ Primarily designed though it is for the poor who have no resources, the fact need not preclude our attracting (by the offer of assistance in the colony) a limited number among classes possessing some small but insufficient capital. Such people would provide employment for labouring peasants whose mental qualifications did not offer sufficient inducement to trust them with land of their own. In short, the whole management requires the exercise of skill and judgment. ”

“ The religious and educational privileges with which Canada is endowed not only surpass our own, but are greater than those enjoyed in any European country.
The Irish poor, numbering perhaps one million, who dwell as aliens in the slums of London and other British cities and towns, are deeply concerned in the execution of this project. They supply recruits for our gaols, orphanages, and workhouses. Competitors with native labour, they are usually unpopular with the working classes among whom they sojourn. ”

“ Half a million souls per annum of increased population, with such inflictions and prospects, do not lighten the load upon the land.
As to pauperism in England and Wales, since 1849 the number of in-door paupers has increased more than one-half. There are certainly fewer individuals now receiving out-door relief, but the total sum annually raised under poor-rates and expended in actual relief of the poor has increased by about two millions of pounds sterling per annum—enough to pay the interest upon an emigration loan of seventy millions sterling. ”

“ The enlightened employer feels this is disadvantageous to his class, since idleness demoralizes and repeated failures take the spirit out of the working man—whose interests do not really conflict with those of the employing class.
Had we approximately ascertained the normal value of the sum of British production in every kind, demonstration would be easy that under actual social exigencies, real or artificial, it has ceased to bear reasonable proportion to the population, which stood at twenty-two millions in 1855 and at thirty millions in 1881. ”

“ That of Ireland has diminished nearly one million, and Ireland accordingly is more prosperous. I beg then to ask whether it is not plain (A.) that Great Britain to-day, with a population of thirty millions, is worse off than in 1866 with twenty-four millions? (B.) That the yield of agricultural products, of manufactures and materials produced for foreign markets even remaining next year and the year after what they are now, while the census of the United Kingdom shall be allowed to rise to thirty-six millions—the nation must be poorer at the close of 1883 than at the end of next month? ”

“ For, supposing 200,000 men, women, and children left our shores in the first year, and that £10 yearly per head be put as the average cost of maintaining them here, then surely society is benefited to the extent of two millions pounds sterling for that one year alone—to say nothing about the future—by their departure. ”

“ He forgot the influence climates, tastes, acquired habits, religion, the opinions of an epoch, have upon cost of living, which is far from being a fixed quantity. What might be true of China would be untrue of France, and vice versâ. Were Frenchmen ready to live like Chinamen, the actual sum of production within the Gallic Republic might be made to maintain twice thirty-seven millions; nor is it likely the efforts of the additional thirty-seven millions would appreciably augment that unknown "sum" a thrifty, industrious race can now show as the upshot of various modes of well ordered energy. ”

“ Those friends of the working man find a hearing because the times are bad. If this or anything else would mend them, agitation could not live. Then, the bare sound of State Directed Emigration offends the ears of theorists who have been reared upon idle stale doctrines of self-help and non-interference.
Argument is useless with opponents like these. Fortunately they are a minority now, and it is likewise true that this idea of a national colonization of Canada by means of the unemployed poor sympathetically attracts and charms most minds. ”

“ Neither could Communism mend matters in Japan, The levelling down on one side and up on the other would bring about a state of things wherein the great majority would quickly accustom themselves to spend and therefore require more than they manage to get through life on as it is.
In new or thinly peopled countries production can increase relatively to a rising census because every fresh pair of arms extracts from the ground under one form or another a fresh factor of value ”

“ Such considerations weigh as nothing with natural adversaries of what would deprive the agitator, the social reconstructor, the dreamer who is bent on pulling everything down, of their professional stock-in-trade. ”

“ If a labourer in Rotherhithe be paid six shillings per diem for discharging timber cargoes, instead of four shillings, for the reason that he is accustomed to spend two shillings more than need be, the timber must be charged so much more to the consumer.
The man who makes two stalks of wheat grow in place of one, adds to production and wealth, while his neighbour who finds two applicants for the empty house where there used to be one, and is thus able to exact twice the former rent for it, adds nothing. ”

“ Her political interests are so manifestly to be promoted by planting her sons and daughters in homes where they shall prosper and be happy, and doubtless be loyal, that it is needless to say anything on that head. Is it not almost as plain that, if Canada, with her present population of four millions, can import British merchandise worth eight millions of pounds sterling (besides merchandise from the United States worth nine) , she will be enabled and bound to import incalculably more when we shall have raised her population? ”