The next measure which appears indispensable to secure internal tranquillity in the empire is, to make a very considerable government grant, to enable the railway companies to complete the principal lines now on foot, but still in an unfinished state. Every consideration of justice, expedience, and necessity, calls for such a grant. Many of these railways can be completed in no other way. Their directors have already borrowed all the money on the security of the undertaking which the law allows (a third;) and the diminished means and straitened credit of the shareholders, for the present at least, has disabled them from answering any further calls. The works must stand still, a deformity and a disgrace to the country, if government relief is not afforded. Parliament has declared the expedience of these lines by having passed the bills for their formation. Most, perhaps all, of these would have been completed ere this, had not the fetters imposed on the currency by the Bank Charter Act so straitened credit that it has become impossible. The very name of government being willing to advance a certain sum, as two or three millions, to enable these companies to resume their work, would so restore and vivify credit, that it is probable a very small part of the sum voted would be taken up by these undertakings. The restoration of private credit, by such a measure on the part of government, would unlock the immense coffers of wealth which now, from the prostration of private credit, lie unemployed in the country. For, such is the strange and anomalous condition in which we stand, that while our streets are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers and artisans seeking employment, our banks and insurance offices are crowded with thousands and hundreds of thousands of unemployed capital seeking investment. Yet these two superfluities cannot reach or relieve each other. Why? Because credit and currency are wanting to enable the one to pass over to the other. Let government lay the foundation of the bridge, and the communication, to mutual advantage, will soon be restored.
Incalculable is the benefit which such a resumption of these works would occasion, both to the individuals connected with, or employed by them, and the country at large. It would give bread at once to hundreds of thousands of unemployed labourers, who have been seduced from their regular avocations by the high wages offered two years ago on the lines, and now find return to their former employments impossible, from these having been filled up: it would thin the Chartist and household suffrage meetings, by stopping the distress which fills them, and giving the working classes something better to do than listening to intemperate and seditious speeches: it would render productive the capital and labour already expended on these undertakings, and give their directors the means both of paying a dividend to the proprietors, and liquidating, at no distant period, the whole debt borrowed from the state: it would assuage and relieve unbounded distress, both in the once wealthy and the labouring classes of the state: it would vivify and facilitate commerce, by opening up means of communication through districts requiring it, and to the formation of which the sanction of the legislature on that ground has been given;—but most of all, it would evince, by deeds more eloquent than words, the sympathy of government with the sufferings of the people, wrest from the agitators their strongest arguments against the constitution as it stands, and relieve government of the fearful imputation to which it is now exposed, of first having encouraged the nation to engage in vast and important internal measures, and then deprived them, by legislative enactments, of the means of carrying them, into complete execution.
A third step which is indispensable to disarm the Chartist agitation and restore internal confidence and peace to the country, is to provide on a great scale, and by government machinery, for the relief of the labour market. Various causes have now conspired to render this a matter of paramount necessity. In Ireland, the long-continued agitation for Repeal, coinciding with the indolent and improvident habits of the people, the desolating effects of the potato famine of 1846, and the enervating consequences of the noble government grant of £10,000,000 to meet its necessities, joined to the seditious and treasonable efforts of the insane Young Ireland party, have so completely paralysed industry, that the Emerald Isle may now be regarded as little more than a huge workshop of pauperism, a sort of officina pauperiei, from whence starving multitudes are incessantly issuing to deluge the adjoining states. The number of emigrants who left it for distant colonies in 1847 was above one hundred thousand, but that is but a small part of the dreadful stream of pauperism which incessantly pours forth from its still crowded shores. In the first nine months of 1847, the number of Irish who came to Glasgow was 49,981: and that number has since been on the increase, for, from the last report of the parochial board of Glasgow, it appears, that in five months and ten days preceding 25th April 1848, the number of Irish who landed in Glasgow was 42,288! This is at the rate of nearly 100,000 a-year; and these squalid immigrants, let it be recollected, come, to a country where labour has already, from the effects of free-trade and a fettered currency, and the disastrous stoppage to orders produced by the French and German revolutions, become a perfect drug in the market; and when in and around the single city of Glasgow, above 100,000 human beings, including dependants, are already out of work! Individual charity, local efforts, are nugatory against such prodigious masses of pauperism; you might as well have expected the staff of the Russian parishes to have resisted the invasion of 1812.
Perhaps there is nothing which has occurred, in our time, so much to be regretted, as that the noble grant of ten millions from Great Britain to relieve the distress of Ireland during the famine, was not, in part at least, devoted to the purposes of emigration. We all know how it was spent. No inconsiderable portion was absorbed by the never-failing frauds of the local Irish agents employed in its distribution, and the remainder in making good roads bad ones. No part was employed in a form which could reproduce itself. There was one thing, and but one, already good in Ireland, and that was the roads. On that one good thing the whole magnificent grant was wasted. Now half the grant, £5,000,000 sterling, would not only have provided 700,000 or 800,000 Irish with the means of crossing the Atlantic, but it would have transported them from the coast up the country to the frontier of the Forest. That is the great point which is never attended to by those who contend for free-trade in emigration; in other words, for liberty to transport the emigrants in crowded and crazy ships, half manned and ill provisioned, to the shores of America, and then leave them in sheds at the first harbour to starve or die of fever.
The advocates for free-trade in emigration forget that labour is as great a drug on the sea-coast of America as on the crowded shores of the Emerald Isle: it is no unusual thing to see five thousand emigrants, chiefly from Ireland, land at New York in a single day. But as much as labour is redundant in the American sea-port towns, it is scarce and in demand in the far west. Millions and tens of millions of unappropriated acres are there to be had for the asking; and an able-bodied man is sure to be instantly taken up at half-a-crown or three shillings a-day. The American papers say that "a stout European, with nothing in the world but his arms and his legs, if moved on to the far west, is worth a thousand dollars to the United States." He is worth more to England; for, if settled in Canada, the Irish pauper immediately becomes a consumer of British manufactures to the extent of £2 a head: if to Australia, to the extent of £10 a head. The free-trader in emigration stops short of all these things: instead of transporting the emigrant to the edge of the Forest, where his labour could produce these results to himself and his country, it leaves him to pine, with his starving children, in a shed on the quay—a burden to the community he is fitted to bless, and carrying with him the seeds of a mortal typhus pestilence into any region which, if he survives, he may visit. As a proof that these statements are not overcharged, we subjoin an official return of the fate of the emigrants who landed under the free-trade system in Canada in 1847.[10] It displays the most stupendous instance that ever was exhibited of the manner in which the absurd principles of free-trade, when applied to pauperism, misery, and typhus fever, may convert what might, under proper management, be the greatest possible blessing to our own people and the colonies, into the greatest possible curse to both.
What should be done is perfectly plain and generally acknowledged. You will not find ten men of sense or information in Great Britain, out of the precincts of the colonial and other government offices, who have two opinions on the subject. To relieve the labour market in Great Britain and Ireland, a great effort should immediately be made to transport some hundred thousand of the very poorest class, who cannot emigrate on their own resources, to Canada, the Cape, and Australia. Wages in the latter country are from 4s. to 5s. a-day for common, 6s. and 7s. a-day for skilled labour. Ireland is the great quarter to which this relief should be extended: if its surplus multitudes are taken off, the pressure on Great Britain will speedily be abated. Ships of war, to lighten the cost of transport, should be employed to transport the emigrants as they do our regiments. Government barracks should be established with proper officers, to receive the emigrants at their landing, separate the healthy from the sick, establish the latter in proper hospitals, so as to stop the spread of typhus fever, and forward, at the public expense, the healthy and active to the frontier. Other officers should be appointed there to allot to them ground, find them tools, furnish them with seed, or provide them with employment. This should be done to at least three hundred thousand or four hundred thousand emigrants annually for some years to come. We should like to see the Chartism or Repeal Mania which would long stand against such a course of humane, and withal wise and truly liberal, legislation.
But such great measures would require money. The average cost of each emigrant so transported and looked to in the colony would be £6 or £7; three or four hundred thousand persons so provided with the means of emigration would cost from £2,000,000 to £2,500,000 a-year. Granted.—Could the money be better bestowed? It would not yield no return, like that devoted to making good Irish roads bad ones: it would convert three hundred thousand paupers annually into consumers of British manufactures to the amount of three or four pounds a head: it would add £1,000,000 or £1,200,000 a-year to the export of British manufactures: it would secure a durable vent for our goods by planting British descendants in the New World: it would spread joy and comfort through Manchester, Birmingham, and Glasgow, not less than Tipperary and Galway: it would extinguish—and extinguish by means of Christian beneficence—the flame of disaffection in the realm: it would give to our people all that French socialism has that is really beneficial, and save them from the unutterable and incalculable evils with which it is fraught: it would restore the balance between capital and industry, so grievously and ruinously deranged by the effects of free-trade of late years: it would go far to alleviate the misery which the pernicious dogmas regarding the currency have spread through the country. For blessings such as these, is the issue of exchequer bills to the extent of two or three millions a-year for some years an extravagant price to pay? Would not five times the sum be at once borrowed by the state in a single year if war were to break out with France or America? Are the dangers of any such war to be compared to those which must inevitably be incurred if the present frightful mass of pauperism, idleness, and destitution, is allowed to continue unrelieved, and to go on increasing in the country? What must, in the end, be the result of such a state of things, but internal anarchy, foreign degradation, ultimate ruin? And is there no obligation upon those whose policy since 1846 has brought these calamities on the nation, to apply the national credit in the attempt at least to relieve them? Hear the just and eloquent observations of the Times on the subject:—
"There is a multitudinous population growing yearly more multitudinous, more exacting, more wretched. The end of each succeeding year sees the addition of nearly a quarter of a million of human beings to the inhabitants of this country. The crowded seats of our manufactures and commerce—Liverpool and Manchester, Nottingham and Stockport—teem with the annual increment of creatures, who exclaim, 'Give us work and bread.' How shall we meet this cry? Shall we tell them that work is an affair of demand; that demand depends upon competition; that competition is an effect of population; that population outruns subsistence; that they are too many; in a word, that they have no right to exist? They would be bold men—that would be a bold government, which should hold such language as this. With Chartism in front, and discontent in the rear, it would be perilous to begin such lecturing. But is not the principle acted on, though not avowed, when—with a vast territorial dominion, in which labour might grow into power, and poverty into wealth—with mines of ore and fields of fertility—with capital calling for labour, and adventure crying for help—the State refuses to acknowledge the duty of settling its redundant multitudes in its own distant lands, or discharges it in a niggardly and grudging mood?
"The danger of such neglect or such parsimony is great. Time glides on, adding alike to the numbers and the discontent of the masses. Misery has strange axioms. The misery of multitudes invents a wild policy. They whose normal condition is endurance, will avenge themselves on the empire by a normal agitation. They whom the national wealth does not assist in bettering their fortune, will wage an obstinate war against wealth, property, and order. We have put down Chartism; but we have not conciliated discontent. Let us beware lest the discontented become the majority. Much depends upon ourselves, much on the use to which we turn our existing establishments; and no establishments have we more valuable than our colonies. A colonial empire founded on the sparings of our superfluous wealth and the cravings of our unemployed industry, would be a grander commemoration of victorious order and triumphant law than a century of hospitals or a myriad of wash-houses. Those who were elated and those who were dejected by the 10th of April, might alike view with pleasure the glorious fabric of a new empire springing from the ruins of a broken faction and the energies of a noble purpose, emblematic of the 'bow of hope that spans the earth'—emblematic of the only faith that ever yet inculcated liberty, fraternity, and equality aright."—Times, May 12, 1848.
But towards finding this vent for our indigent and unemployed population at home, in the colonies, it is indispensable that the colonies should be preserved to the British crown; and from the effects of free-trade, it is very doubtful whether this will long be the case. Every body knows that the West Indies have been utterly ruined by the act of 1846: estates are valueless, and the planting of canes is rapidly ceasing. We know of an estate which, within fifteen years, was sold for £38,000, which was knocked down within these few weeks for £20! To give an idea of the feelings which the unexampled injustice to which they have been subjected have excited in these once noble and loyal islands, we subjoin an extract from the Jamaica Despatch of April 7:—
"The affairs of Jamaica have now arrived at that desperate crisis that there is, we believe, not one man in the colony whose dependence rests solely on property invested within it, that would not, could his single voice effect the change, pronounce at once for adhesion to any other government than that which has beggared him. Loyalty is, at best, but a sentiment dependent for stability upon circumstances. We love our country so long as, and because we think, our country protects our lives, our liberties, and our properties. We are patriots whilst the government of our country secures to us those possessions which our industry has earned for us, and which the written constitution has guaranteed us. All human experience shows this limit to the most exalted spirit of loyalty and patriotism. True it is we have not the power of Canada. We are as unable as we are unwilling to change our lot by force; but let England beware lest passive alienation of every sentiment that can attach us to her as a nation do not prove even more dangerous to her colonial power than any active spirit of disaffection could be. This magnificent colony has, indeed, been sinfully and treasonably sacrificed. The property of the Queen's subjects has been confiscated without offence on their part; whilst, in a political point of view, each day renders the colony less and less valuable to the Crown as a national dependency. All commerce between Jamaica and the mother country must speedily cease. Of exports there can be none. Ministers—the fatal Whig Government, which has proved to be the evil genius of the West Indies whenever destiny has placed it in the ascendant—have pronounced the final doom of West Indian cultivation. After August next, when the present crops shall have been taken off, five estates in six must of necessity cease to become sugar producers."—Jamaica Despatch, April 7.