APPENDIX.
The Legislative Council of New South Wales, on the recommendation of the Committee (whose report we give below, I.), have passed an Act (which we also give, II.), rendering it lawful to make contracts with emigrants in this or any other country,—to bind them to work for wages settled in Europe—to repay the cost of their passage to Australia—to compel emigrants sent out by the Emigration Commissioners to repay part of their passage money—to apprentice boys and girls above the age of thirteen for four years, at £5 for two years, and £10 for two years, with board.
The principle that emigrants should repay part or all the cost of their passage is sound, but whether the mode proposed by the Parliament of New South Wales will work, we may be permitted to doubt.
Attempts to make labourers or mechanics work for less than current wages have always failed in this country, and so have contracts binding men to serve a particular master in a skilled trade.
If the Council had made the passage-money paid by the colony a debt due by the emigrant, that would have been reasonable; but to bind a man in Europe to serve a master he has never seen, in an employment he has never practised, for wages to be fixed by the master, is to sow the seeds of perpetual litigation and discontent,—especially as the magistrates who will have to decide the disputes are inevitably employers of labour; and no man is a safe judge in his own cause.
In like manner the theory of apprenticing minors is reasonable, but this legislation is one-sided.
The wages will often be inadequate, and no provision is made in the Act for the inspection or protection of those apprenticed orphans. There may be Mrs. Sloanes in Australia as well as in England.
We feel for the hard position of the great stockowners and other employers of labour in the difficult position in which they are placed by the labour attraction of the gold-fields, but we venture to hint that the only law which will bind the labourer to his employer under such circumstances, is the law of kindness. "One man can lead the ox to water; a hundred cannot make him drink."
