“‘We, the undersigned, being desirous of encouraging the establishment of a line of first-class steam-packets, offering increased facilities and advantages for the transit of passengers and goods to and from Australia and the different important States in the Pacific Ocean, and being deeply impressed with the advantages of the route by the way of the Isthmus of Panama, since the establishment of the railroad at that place connecting the two oceans,—hereby signify our approval of the projected British and Australian Direct Screw Steam Packet Company, for the purpose of carrying out the line of communication to those parts in the most efficient manner. (Signed)—R. Gladstone & Co., Horrocks, Jackson & Co., Robert Smith & Co., Robert Gardner, Samuel Mendel, Robt. Barbour & Brothers, John Pender & Co., George Fraser, Son, & Co., Henry B. Jackson, R. I. Farbridge & Co., B. Liebert, Prescott, Brothers, & Co., Thos. Cardwell & Co., Oswald Stevenson & Co., J. A. Turner & Co.’”
It is most desirable that whatever line is selected for conveying the mails should be as far as possible remunerative, in order to enable Government to fix the rates of postage as low as possible. The present charges are preposterously high. A letter by a sailing ship, which may be from ninety to one hundred days on the passage, costs eightpence, if under half an ounce. By steam and overland mail, it is from a shilling to twentypence, if under a quarter of an ounce in weight, for what to a man, whose caligraphy is not of a diminutive order, or who cannot command “bank” or “foreign post” paper, must be only half a letter. Cheap postage for the newly settled population of Australia, and for their friends in this country, is as essential as regular and expeditious mails are to the mercantile communities in both countries. We must remark, too, that newspapers and trade circulars are as much required to be conveyed expeditiously as mercantile letters. By the last overland mail a fortunate few received despatches via Marseilles in sixty days. The bulk of the mail, consisting of newspapers and letters from emigrants, &c., was not delivered until the arrival of the steamer at Southampton, nearly seventy days from her leaving the colony.
We have certainly little hope of our Government doing much to develop the resources of Australia. The Post-Office authorities may, indeed, be induced to concede to the colony, and to the mercantile community of this country, a direct mail communication via Panama, by the prospect—indeed, almost certainty—that if they fail in the performance of their duty, the United States Government will do it for them. The experiment made by the American steam-ship “Golden Age” is said to have been, commercially, an unprofitable one. But the application of steam power to the performance of long voyages is even as yet in its infancy. The chief difficulty hitherto experienced in making short and regular passages to a distant port has been the large quantity of coals required to be carried, which diminishes the power of carrying cargo in our mail steamers. It is estimated that our Cunard Company’s and the Collins’ boats would have to diminish their speed, and to forfeit some of their character for regularity in the transmission of mails to and from America, were the two countries a thousand miles farther apart. But at the present time an improvement is making in the machinery of one of the boats of the latter Company by her owners in the United States, which, it is stated, is likely to economise very materially her consumption of fuel, the saving by which may either be applied to increasing her speed or her carrying capabilities. The same improvement can be adopted in our Australian steamers. But from the Colonial Office we expect literally nothing. The treatment of Australia by that Office has been, from first to last, most neglectful; and even since the gold discoveries, and the recognition by all thinking men of the vast importance which the colony has assumed as a feeder of the commerce of England, our statesmen have appeared incapable of appreciating its claims to their consideration. A glaring instance of this perverse or ignorant blindness has recently occurred in the filling up of the office of Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia. The first party appointed was Mr Stonor, an Irish member, of no great mark in Parliament or elsewhere. This gentleman duly sailed for the colony, but was shortly after his departure unseated for bribery. Such was the grossness of the charges against him, brought to light by a parliamentary inquiry, that the Colonial Office were compelled to despatch his recall. Another Lieutenant-Governor was to be appointed; and the choice fell upon the Hon. F. Lawley, M.P. for Beverley. Mr Lawley’s claims to hold an appointment, so important at the present crisis in a country which eminently requires the supervising of a practical statesman, experienced in the management of colonial affairs, are not easy to discover. He was a young man—young at least in public life—twenty-eight years of age; had passed rather a distinguished course at the university, and had held for a few months the situation of private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer; but he was chiefly known to the public as a runner of race-horses, and a rather unsuccessful speculator on the Turf. The noble Lord at the head of the Administration, it appears, had some interest in the borough—Beverley—which Mr Lawley represented, and had also a son, who was ambitious of parliamentary honours. Mr Lawley was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of South Australia; vacated his seat for Beverley; and Lord Aberdeen’s son was elected to fill his place. We only mention this as a curious coincidence. But Mr Lawley had some sense of honour in his breast, as became a young man of his rank and birth, or he may have had merely a correct appreciation of “the fitness of things.” Subsequently to his ill-success upon the Turf—it is not said whether or not during his tenure of his confidential office under the Chancellor of the Exchequer—he had speculated on the Stock Exchange—and lost. His resolution—taken, no doubt, after a due examination of the state of his affairs—was promptly notified to the Government. He resigned the office to which he had been appointed; and the colony was spared the infliction of a Lieutenant-Governor in whom the propensity for gambling was so strongly developed, and whose favourite sphere of action would probably have been upon the race-course of Adelaide. What may be the effect upon the minds of the population of this treatment of South Australia by the Colonial Office we are not to foretell. It cannot, however, advance that Office in their estimation.
Failing the hope of efficient Government aid to the growth of the Australian colonies—as we think it will fail—those colonies have within their reach the means of aiding themselves in one vitally important matter—the securing of a larger supply of labour. The funds accruing from the sale of lands in the colony have, for some years past, been devoted to the purpose of assisting the emigration of useful classes of labourers—principally agricultural—to the various colonies; the business being managed in this country by the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners. Of course, a crotchety management was to be anticipated from such a body, composed of parties utterly unversed in the business. We believe it will be found by the colonists that the management has not only been crotchety, but extravagantly expensive, and even destructive of the lives of the intending emigrants. A few extracts from the Report of the Committee (1853) to the Colonial Secretary will be sufficiently intelligible as to the inefficient working of the present system. In the first place, it will be made clear that a great public office, with already a multiplicity of business to conduct, is incompetent, from its very composition, of carrying on a trade in which they have to compete with experienced private firms. After mentioning the utter failure of an experiment made by them of sending out a large number of Highland emigrants on board H.M.S. the “Hercules,” which was proceeding to Hong-Kong as an hospital-ship, and was offered them by the Admiralty for the purpose, the Commissioners report:—
“Meanwhile applications for assistance were made on behalf of Germans and Swiss, and, by a very respectable committee at Madras, of the half-caste population of India. But the growing eagerness to reach Australia soon rendered it unnecessarily pressing for us either to close with applications of this kind, or to relax our ordinary rules in regard to British emigrants. This eagerness soon became excessive—so much so, that, at one time, our office contained no less than 18,000 applications for passages to Australia. The number of letters received in the month of June, which, in 1850, was 1564, and, in 1851, 2884, amounted in 1852 to 18,910, being at an average rate, excluding Sundays, of 727 a day. And when it is remembered that a large number of these transmitted small sums of money, requiring considerable accuracy of treatment, and that a far greater number respected the time and manner in which poor emigrants were to leave their country for ever—a matter in which any inaccuracy, though trifling in respect to the magnitude of the whole service, was of the greatest importance to the individuals—that a great number of our correspondents were persons who could not be counted upon for expressing their own meaning with clearness, or understanding correctly what was written to them—and, finally, that all this mass of details, by no means capable of a cursory or careless treatment, was to be disposed of by persons partly overtaxed and partly new to those details, it will be seen, we hope, that we laboured under no ordinary difficulty in meeting the unusual pressure.”
Of course, such a business, attempted to be carried on by an inexperienced public board, sitting in a central office in London, although dealing with emigration from various ports in the United Kingdom, was likely to run into arrear and confusion. Individual local firms, however, feel no difficulty in carrying it on, upon a scale fully equal to that of the Board, when measured by the extent of their establishments. Those individual firms would have forwarded promptly all the Government emigrants which the Colonial Land and Emigration Commissioners might have thought proper to hand over to their care, and managed all the details and correspondence dwelt upon as being so onerous upon them. But the Commissioners must needs charter ships of their own, throwing away all the advantages which private merchants possess, of procuring profitable freight for a portion of each ship sent out. And they had to “pay dear for their whistle.” At page 18 of the Report, they say: “The freights, which in June 1851 had fallen as low as £10, and in one instance to £9, 9s. 5d. per adult, rose in June 1852 to upwards of £17; and since that time they have actually reached the enormous amount of £23 per adult.” Undoubtedly, they might have reached this “enormous amount” at the time named. But private and most respectable and experienced firms, at the dearest time mentioned, taking advantage of their ability of paying merchandise freight, would have sent out emigrants, supplied to them by the Commissioners, at an average price of two-thirds the amount, and furnished them with the ample stores, the ventilation, and the other conducives to health insisted upon by the local Government Commissioners, in the case of voluntary as well as Government emigration. Taking from one hundred to one hundred and fifty passengers, paid for by the Commissioners, in each ship, they might have afforded to charge even lower.
But the Commissioners had a model system of their own to exhibit to the world, and peculiar views as to the fitting up of emigrant ships, more calculated, they maintained, to secure the health and comfort and safety of poor persons going out at the expense of the colony, a knowledge of the nature of which was denied to the experienced Government officers stationed at the various ports, whose duty it is to superintend the accommodation and quality of provisions afforded to persons going out at their own expense. Let us see what was the working of this model system! They state that, in consequence of the high rates for shipping, they were compelled to adopt large ships, and they add, page 18:—
“We lament to say that in those despatched from Liverpool the result was unfortunate. Among the adults, indeed, no bad consequence followed, but amongst the infants and young children, whose numbers had been increased by the then recent relaxation of our rules, a great mortality occurred. On the ‘Bourneuf,’ ‘Marco Polo,’ and ‘Wanata,’ in which the aggregate number of passengers was 2581, the number of deaths was 181, of which no less than 152 were below four years of age. On the ‘Ticonderago,’ 165 persons died on the voyage, or in quarantine after arrival, of whom 65 were below fourteen, and 18 were less than one year old.”
It is a somewhat singular fact, that in not one of these vessels, since their being sailed under private management, has more than the ordinary rate of mortality prevailed. After this disastrous loss of human life, the Commissioners came to the resolution of diminishing the number of children allowed to each passenger, and limited the size of their ships. Private firms allowed the same number, and increased the size of their ships. Yet the latter have had no increase in the rate of mortality, whilst, only a few weeks ago, a ship chartered by the Commissioners lost at sea—having only reached Cork—in putting back to their depot at Birkenhead, and after placing the sick in hospital, upwards of sixty lives! The absurdity, on the part of the Commissioners, in employing exclusively small ships, is thus apparent, even in a sanitary point of view. The large clippers, built expressly for the trade, have at the same time had the advantage over their competitors in quick sailing. In proof of this fact, we quote a table, extracted from a file of the London Times of this year, showing the average number of days occupied in the passage by the vessels of different tonnage, ranging from 200 tons upwards, despatched from Liverpool to Australia in the years 1852 and 1853.
| 1852. Average number of days. | 1853. Average number of days. | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under | 200 | tons, | 137 | 133 | ||
| From | 200 | to | 300 | tons | 122 | 122 |
| „ | 300 | „ | 400 | „ | 123 | 113 |
| „ | 400 | „ | 500 | „ | 118 | 112 |
| „ | 500 | „ | 600 | „ | 113 | 112 |
| „ | 600 | „ | 700 | „ | 107 | 103 |
| „ | 700 | „ | 800 | „ | 108 | 101 |
| „ | 800 | „ | 900 | „ | 103 | 100 |
| „ | 900 | „ | 1000 | „ | 102 | 95 |
| „ | 1000 | „ | 1200 | „ | 96 | 91 |
| „ | 1200 | & | upwards, | 91 | 90 | |