Mrs. Chisholm, being called before this committee, produced a complete statistical statement, exhibiting the numbers, ages, sexes, characters, and trades of the unemployed (in all 2,034 souls), the number of weeks and average number per man they had been unemployed. These tables show some curious particulars: 59 carpenters and 25 joiners, 10 butlers and 10 coachmen and grooms, 15 cabinetmakers, 26 brickmakers, 10 quarrymen and 19 bricklayers, 2 surgeons, 2 hairdressers, and 1 tailor; 244 farm labourers—in all 572. "The large number of children made it difficult to provide for many of these families." * * "The system of relieving distress has now been in operation for a year; we have been consuming capital, we can only remove distress by producing it." "Last year I settled some families on land, and, considering the many difficulties thrown in my way, they have succeeded remarkably well on private land. I wished to try the system of leasing, in order to see whether the people were industrious, and could subsist on land; and I have satisfied myself that, although any gentleman would lose a large fortune if he were to commence as a farmer, where the family are all workers an industrious man cannot do better than get on land. The great difficulty with me has been that I have never had an opportunity of putting a sufficient number of people together; and where they are only a few they have no team, no set of tools, and there is a constant struggle; yet they do succeed."
Now, this in a few words is the true art of colonisation. Locate poor men on waste land in England or Ireland and they sink under the multiplicity of money payments or debts, having to compete with a fund of cheap labour, and inferior land against superior land and skilled cultivation. Locate the same men in a colony, and they rise buoyed up by a surrounding dear labour market, which enables them to barter their chief possession, labour, for seeds, tools, stock, or whatever they may need; a virgin soil, and the absence of money payments for rent or taxes, and of competition of agricultural skill, compensating for the want of capital and rural experience. Thus, a day's labour from time to time with a neighbouring farmer will buy a yoke of bullocks, a dray, a quarter of wheat or maize, and assist both. In England and Ireland a poor man clings to land in hopes of making more than bare wages by extra toil; in a colony a man desires land to keep his family together, even at some sacrifice of money wages. In old countries the little freehold must be divided with sons and sons-in-law; in a colony the full-fledged brood can always, if idle "protective" laws do not impede, go further afield, and find a new site for a nest. So argued in other words Mrs. Chisholm; and many a flockowner, now
