Patrick Matthew

“ Why, then, should the condition of the working population of Britain not be as favourable as that of America? Simply because the field of labour, from our narrow home territory, dense population, and restrictive trade system, is more limited in proportion to the labour supply, and that we fail to profit by our opportunities of extending it. A sufficient emigration would render it equally, if not more favourable. Let the truly charitable—those who have the welfare of their suffering countrymen really at heart, reflect that ignorance is criminal, where knowledge is within their reach. ”

“ We wonder much what fascination can exist to a mind of so much ability and culture as that of Sir Henry Steuart, in decorating a few dull unprofitable acres,—causing a few bushes and bush-like trees to change place from one side of a dull green to the other!—laying digested plans of action, embracing a great number of years, to accomplish this very important feat, which most probably the next heir will make the business of his life to undo, by turning them back to their old quarters, if he does not, with more wisdom, grub them out {228} altogether as cumberers of the soil! ”

“ Prevented by our trade-restrictive system from obtaining a market in foreign nations for the immense surplus fabrics which this vast increase of power is capable of producing, there is only one other available resource,—to transplant our surplus working-population to new lands. This would not only bring about a salutary balance in our home economy, but at the same time, by raising up new and most valuable customers, would afford wide and extending fields of consumption, commensurate with the future increase of our powers of production. ”

“ There is small room here for the discovery of the habitat and native character of plants, no chance of meeting with a rare species, every thing is modelled to art. The land-bailiff is an adept. With his dirty composts and top-dressings, he smothers the fog and the daisy; the scythe {229} sweeps down every idle weed, every wild flower which escapes his large-mouthed oxen. The live smooth bark of the lush fast-growing trees, affords no footing for the various and beautiful tribes of mosses and lichens. ”

“ The cost of free labour in a new colony, or wherever all the land of fair quality is not occupied, has always been—from the ambition to be his own master, inherent in man,—must necessarily be, greater than the producing value of the labour. Where fair land is unoccupied, none but he, who, from some natural defect or incapacity, is incapable of working to himself so well as to produce a maintenance, will ever work as an agricultural servant to another, excepting at a hire beyond the value of his labour ”

“ Sir Henry remarks, that “no man who knows any thing of wood, will put down the oak or the elm on light sand or gravel, as it is only on deep loam and clay that the oak, in particular, will really thrive and grow into timber.” No man who knows how much a suitable soil for any kind of plant is under regulation of the moistness or dryness of the atmosphere, and other circumstances, will refrain from smiling at Sir Henry’s very superficial acquaintance with his own subject, and at the manner he thus again brings forward mankind to testify in support of his own error. ”

“ It is merely a nursing of misery,—keeping up a vast number of unemployed people, ready at all times, should labour come a little more into demand, to compete with those in employment, and keep down wages to the lowest pitch that the animal machine can be kept working upon. It is the interest of the property-holders to have a very numerous population at this lowest pitch, and their poor-rate and charity contributions are virtually a mere pittance-supply to prevent their indirect slaves from perishing. ”

“ Does any one dread the necessity of foreign supply, from the foolish fear that it may be cut off by war? Keeping out of view the argument, that ere the British pride would suffer other domination on the waters, our numbers would be well thinned away, they know little of the influence of circumstance on man, who do not perceive that, in the event of free trade, and of the population of Britain increasing beyond what the country, under the best possible culture, could support, the very necessity of being mistress of the seas would make her so. ”

“ The plain fact is, that the Swan River and South Australia colonization has been sacrificed, and the New Zealand London colonization is about to be sacrificed, to a scheme of master and servants, under circumstances where master and servants, at least to any considerable extent, is impracticable. In a new colony, at least under the present diffusion of knowledge amongst British men, it is imperative that the majority of the colonists be working capitalists. This is absolutely necessary to solder a new society together. ”

“ Let their ideas shoot while they recline under the lone magnificence of the primeval forest, while they gallop over the unappropriated desert, free as the Bedouin, or lie down composedly to sleep, serenaded by the hyena and jackal’s howl, and lion’s roar. ”

“ Under a properly regulated colonization, to obey the common instincts of nature, “to increase and multiply,” instead of being, as it too frequently has been in Britain, a curse, will become, as in the United States, a blessing. Things have been so far misdirected hitherto, that the greatly increased facilities of production of what is necessary to the comfort and pleasurable existence of man, which, under proper direction, ought to have benefited all classes, has only administered to the luxury of a comparatively small number, the property class. ”

“ The fog-bee has lost its dwelling, the humble-bee its flowers, and they have flown away. Scarce an insect remains, except the swollen earth-worm, the obscene beetle, and the bloated toad, crawling among the rank grass. There is a heavy dankness in the air itself. ”

“ The proper means to prevent settlers from seizing upon more land than they can put to good use, and taking up too wide an arrangement, is not a high price upon fresh lands (which is merely to suck out the life’s-blood of the colonist just as he is about to commence the arduous combat) , but a low land tax per acre, rated permanently to three or more class qualities of soil. This is the only genuine tax,—should be the only tax, and made available to the whole government of the colony. ”

“ As civilization progresses under the influence of navigation, and the earth exchanges her straggling hordes of savages for enlightened densely-peopled nations, every climate and country will be more set apart to its appropriate production, and the utility of the great conduit, the OCEAN, will more and more be developed, and become the grand theatre of contested dominion—superiority there being almost synonymous with Universal Empire—dry land only the footstool of the Mistress of the Seas1. ”

“ Estimating the advantages of position, extent, climate, fertility, adaptation for trade,—all the causes which have tended to render Britain the emporium of the world, we can observe only one other spot on the earth equally, if not more favoured by nature, and that is New Zealand. ”

“ The timber of our beech, while green, is by far the hardest of our large growing trees, and, in the American forest, the members of the beechen family match better than those of any other, with the perseverance of the ruthless Yankee; the roots retaining the hardness deeper in the earth than those of any other tree, and being so plaited and netted throughout the ground for a considerable space around the bulb, that it is next to impossible to trench or dig over the soil till they have decayed. ”

“ We find in Van Diemen’s Land, which approaches the New Zealand climate, that the rose of health is common, although it seldom is so on the main of Australia, where the air is too dry and parching for this species of flower. The British Fair may rely that England’s Rose will not fail to blossom in New Zealand in all its native richness, giving the unmatched tinge of flower-beauty and freshness. ”

“ Every carpenter in Scotland knows the extraordinary difference between the durability of Highland oak and oak usually imported from England, for the spokes of wheels. Every extensive timber-dealer is aware of the superior hardness of oak raised in Cumberland and Yorkshire, over that of Monmouthshire and Herefordshire; and such a dealer in selecting trees in the same woods, in any district, will always give the preference to oak of slow growth, and found in cold and clayey soils, and to ash on rocky cliffs, which he knows to be the soils and climates natural to both. ”

“ What is required is, that the extension of colonization should go hand in hand with the extension of manufactures, thus generating new markets in proportion to the increase of fabrics.
But, at the present moment, it is as a salutary drain to our overstocked labour-market, that colonization is so vitally necessary. To bring things to a healthy state, a vast exportation of working-population must in the first place be effected, and to keep them so, a constant great stream of emigration must be afterwards kept up. ”

“ It is impossible to describe the relief we feel when we emerge again into varied nature beyond the ring-fence,—we have the hill and the furze, the wild-violet and the thyme, and all the sweet diversity of our subalpine flora. We have the thatched, patched hut, the fine ragged children, the blooming cottage-girl,—we have the corn-field, where weeds of every dye, the beautiful centaurea and scabiosa, the elegant fumaria, the gaudy cock-rose, and the splendid chrysanthemum, are contending for existence with the cerealeæ. ”

“ Colonial intercourse is in effect a circumscribed kind of free trade, under peculiarly favourable circumstances; and the amazing increase, and vast extent and advantage, of our colonial trade, is the most direct proof of the advantage, not only to Britain, but to mankind, which would result from free trade over all. Every enactment to prevent the exchange of the produce of labour between man and man, and nation and nation, if the article is not injurious to health and morals, is truly diabolic. ”

“ We know not how others are affected, but there is no other place on earth where we have felt such oppression and weariness, as in the extensive smoothed park and lawns around the country seat. We sicken under the uniformity of the heavy-looking round-headed trees,—the dulness of the flat fat pasture, undecorated by a single weed,—the quiet stupid physiognomy of the cattle,—the officiousness of the sleek orderly menial. ”

“ With an overflowing capital, and a population, notwithstanding our emigration, increasing at present nearly 400,000 annually, and as things are regulated beyond the means of full subsistence and labour-demand, Britain is placed under circumstances more favourable than ever occurred at any former period for carrying the principle of colonization into effect to its fullest, most salutary extent. The importance of emigration, as before stated, is proved by the immense and most advantageous trade we now carry on with the countries we have colonized ”

“ There is more beauty and unity of design in this continual balancing of life to circumstance, and greater conformity to those dispositions of nature which are manifest to us, than in total destruction and new creation. It is improbable that much of this diversification is owing to commixture of species nearly allied, all change by this appears very limited, and confined within the bounds of what is called Species; the progeny of the same parents, under great difference of circumstance, might, in several generations, even become distinct species, incapable of co-reproduction. ”

“ There will, no doubt, be servants or helps in New Zealand, and need for them, too, in some cases, independent, even, of what the natives will supply. But any scheme of emigration to encourage the system of master and servants to such an unnatural excess as to allot (as it is said they propose) 75 per cent of the whole price of the lands to carry on the servant-trade from Britain to New Zealand, would be attended with the most injurious consequences, not only to the employment and civilization of the natives, but to the prosperity of the settlement, if it did not ruin it altogether. ”

“ Whether a greater accumulation of vegetable mould or enriching of the soil, would take place under a system of rotation of crops, stirring of the ground, and manuring, or under Nature’s own system of management—whether, under forest, or under the rich leafy grasses depastured by cattle, is a question of the greatest intricacy, and only admits of local decision, being dependent upon climate, soil, and circumstance. ”

“ We would remit from the heated fancies of ignorant closet colonists to the experienced judgment of men who have seen colonization going on, and more especially who have borne a part in it, to determine of the utter unfitness of the “sufficient price.” Has the attempt at the sufficient price worked well in South Australia? Has not a great proportion of the small capitalists lost their capital and been forced to become servants (in some cases obliged to the servants they had carried out for procuring a master) , while only the larger capitalists have been able to hold out? ”