Note 8 — REASONS FOR PREFERRING NEW ZEALAND TO EVERY OTHER EMIGRATION FIELD, AND FOR FORMING A SCOTS NEW ZEALAND COMPANY.

The cost of free labour in a new colony, or wherever all the land of fair quality is not occupied, has always been—from the ambition to be his own master, inherent in man,—must necessarily be, greater than the producing value of the labour. Where fair land is unoccupied, none but he, who, from some natural defect or incapacity, is incapable of working to himself so well as to produce a maintenance, will ever work as an agricultural servant to another, excepting at a hire beyond the value of his labour; consequently, the work performed for hire will be done in a very inferior and unprofitable manner. This must cause the hired workman to be not upon the best terms with his employer, and he will be felt to be a plague rather than a help. Mr Wakefield’s “sufficient price” plan, “a high price upon fresh land,” at least “such a price as render slave labour a loss, plenty of free hired labour being made attainable,” is one of the most crude and impracticable schemes in reference to a British race population, that the brain even of modern political economists has hatched. Nevertheless, he has procured a whole host of followers, including the South Australian and New Zealand Committees. How would people be prevented from settling beyond the precincts of his high-price-limited territory? Would he keep an army scouring the country beyond this line with fire and sword? Nothing short of this would suffice; and we should have enough of bush-fighting. We would remit from the heated fancies of ignorant closet colonists to the experienced judgment of men who have seen colonization going on, and more especially who have borne a part in it, to determine of the utter unfitness of the “sufficient price.” Has the attempt at the sufficient price worked well in South Australia? Has not a great proportion of the small capitalists lost their capital and been forced to become servants (in some cases obliged to the servants they had carried out for procuring a master), while only the larger capitalists have been able to hold out? Has not the high price of land, L.1 per acre, instead of condensing been the means of dispersion,—throwing the stock owners with their flocks out to wander over the undivided territory for which they pay no price, which in fact is worth no price—perhaps no great loss in that arid country where change of place is necessary in the season of drought to obtain herbage and water—a country only fit for this Tartar or Arab system of husbandry? Has the miserable Adelaide and the steril sands around it, a place scarcely capable of affording support, even under the best culture for which it is fitted, for a few hundreds, become any thing but the grave of the hopes of the many thousands who have been thrown upon this desert coast by means of the money extracted from capitalist emigrants by this “sufficient price,” or by money borrowed at 10 per cent. per annum upon the faith of the “sufficient price?” Adelaide will never reach higher than a miserable village, unless like Sydney it get an extraneous Government expenditure of several hundred thousand pounds per annum (Sydney without this would have remained a miserable village). As soon as the money spent by emigrants (not unfrequently all they possess) waiting upon the lagging surveys, or upon some plausible means of employing their little capital to advantage, shall have ceased to flow, Adelaide will appear in its natural poverty.

Is the sufficient price calculated for New Zealand? Why import so many servants when it is so politic to employ native labour, and to leave the labour market open for this supply? The natives say they have a double motive for selling land to the British—the price they receive for it, and the employment they procure in cultivating it. Why take means to prevent dispersion when prudence will direct a pretty close arrangement? Why take means to procure a consolidated population as a market for agricultural produce, when a market so very favourable already exists in the agricultural produce-demand of Australia and of the South Sea Whalers, together with the British and Indian demand for flax and spars? For what then is a “sufficient price” desirable? Only for the private emolument of managing secretaries and other officials, to whom the “sufficient price” will pay a pretty good tax in transitu, and to be a plausible pretext for the Land Company resident in London to obtain the warrantry of the Legislature for monopolizing whole provinces of New Zealand, and for selling the land at a high price to the buyer;—no doubt thinking the buyer will be a more industrious colonist after his pockets have been emptied into this land-jobbing Company’s coffers. From some hints which have been thrown out in Parliament lately, it would seem to be in contemplation to have something like “a sufficient price” in the British colonies in the West Indies (perhaps practicable there by a sufficient demonstration of bayonets), that is, a plan of preventing the working black population from procuring portions of land, by the industrious cultivation of which they could maintain themselves in ease and comfort. By this plan it is intended “to make slave-labour a loss, plenty of hired labour being attainable,” the black population being thus compelled to labour to the planters at whatever hire the planters choose to give, or to starve. Perhaps there is some understood stipulation, that the planters will restore the twenty millions to the British Legislature on the passing of this “sufficient price” act, as well they might? Welcome back slavery to the West Indies—welcome West Indian slavery to the working man in Australia and New Zealand, rather than the “sufficient price.” But it is an absurdity, and, if persisted in, will ruin these colonies. For a complete exposure of the indirect systems of slavery, see “Emigration Fields,” pages 53 and 187.