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. Here is the crying commercial want of our time. Our modernized machinery and factories can produce full fifty per cent, more goods than are turned out, with very few, if any, more hands. Now, the rapid utilization of our colonial lands on the system traced, means an equally rapid creation of fresh customers.
The landed proprietor and the farmer may imagine all this can do nothing for them. As it is, they find good farm hands too scarce, and in the summer of 1882 attention was called in the Times' correspondence columns to the draining away of labourers from hamlet and village to towns and cities, that has seriously inconvenienced country gentlemen and farmers, who are, accordingly, afraid to encourage emigration from the town slums lest it should intensify the evil. My Scheme is not open to this objection. The instituting training farms, (see par. 18. of Scheme) which would be recruited not alone from the various sources indicated, but from the family of almost every artisan and labourer in the kingdom, urged as these classes would find themselves by public opinion, throughout their own body, and by a natural wish to let their children have a chance of qualifying for the Emigration prize, could not fail to reverse the current, and restore the agricultural calling in popular estimation. There would be a rush back to the land, and to country pursuits, from every quarter, with, as a most speedy result, abundance of skilled well conducted hinds. This is too obvious to need elaboration.
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; speaking, be it understood, of the classes who work. At any rate, it will be conceded that men do as a rule fulfil feasible engagements when irresistibly compelled, and the existing law in Canada would compel execution by the colonist of the engagement contracted by him in the Indentures mentioned in paragraph 11. of my Scheme, the wording of which must be large and stringent enough to bind him as thoroughly as words can bind. Two
