Greater Britain

The tone of Victorian democracy is not American. There is the defiant way of taking care of themselves and ignoring their neighbors, characteristic of the founders of English plantations in all parts of the world; the spirit which prompted the passing, in 1852, of the act prohibiting the admission to the colony of convicts for three years after they had received their pardons; but the English race here is not Latinized as it is in America. If it were, Australian democracy would not be so “shocking” to the squatters. Democracy, like Mormonism, would be nothing if found among Frenchmen or people with black faces, but it is at first sight very terrible, when it smiles on you from between a pair of rosy Yorkshire cheeks.

The political are not greater than the social differences between Australia and America. Australian society resembles English middle-class society; the people have, in matters of literature and religion, tastes and feelings similar to those which pervade such communities as those of Birmingham or Manchester. On the other hand, the vices of America are those of aristocracies; her virtues, those of a landed republic. Shop and factory are still in the second rank; wheat and corn still the prevailing powers. In all the Australian colonies land is coming to the front for the second time under a system of small holdings, except in Queensland, where it has never ceased to rule, and that under an oligarchic form of society and government; but it is doubtful whether, looking to the size of Melbourne, the landed democracy will ever outvote the townfolk in Victoria.

That men of ability and character are proscribed has been one of the charges brought against colonial democracy. For my part, I found gathered in Melbourne, at the University, at the Observatory, at the Botanical Garden, and at the government offices, men of the highest scientific attainments, drawn from all parts of the world, and tempted to Australia by large salaries voted by the democracy. The statesmen of all the colonies are well worthy of the posts they hold. Mr. Macalister, in Queensland, and Mr. Martin, at Sydney, are excellent debaters. Mr. Parkes, whose biography would be the typical history of a successful colonist, and who has fought his way up from the position of a Birmingham artisan free-emigrant to that of Colonial Secretary of New South Wales, is an extremely able writer and deep thinker. The business powers of the present Colonial Treasurer of New South Wales are remarkable; and Mr. Higinbotham, the Attorney-General of Victoria, possesses a fund of experience and a power of foresight which it would be hard to equal at home. Many of the ministers in all the colonies are men who have worked themselves up from the ranks, and it is amusing to notice the affected horror with which their antecedents have been recalled by those who have brought out a pedigree from the old country. A government clerk in one of the colonies told me that the three last ministers at the head of his department had been “so low in the social scale, that my wife could not visit theirs.”

Class animosity and political feud runs much higher, and drives its roots far deeper into private life in Victoria than in any other English-speaking country I have seen. Political men of distinction are shunned by their opponents in the streets and clubs; and, instead of its being possible to differ on politics and yet continue friends, as in the old country, I have seen men in Victoria refuse to sit down to dinner with a statesman from whose views on land questions they happened to dissent. A man once warned me solemnly against dining with a quiet grave old gentleman, on the ground that he was “a most dangerous radical – a perfect firebrand.”

Treated in this way, it is not strange that the democratic ministers and members stand much upon their dignity, and colonial Parliaments are in fact not only as haughty as the parent assembly at Westminster, but often assert their privileges by the most arbitrary of means. A few weeks before I arrived in Melbourne, a member of the staff of the Argus newspaper was given up by the proprietors to soothe the infuriated Assembly. Having got him, the great question of what to do with him arose, and he was placed in a vault with a grated window, originally built for prisoners of the House, but which had been temporarily made use of as a coal-hole. Such a disturbance was provoked by the alleged barbarity of this proceeding, that the prisoner was taken to a capital room up stairs, where he gave dinner-parties every day. His opponents said the great difficulty was to get rid of him, for he seemed to be permanently located in the Parliament-house, and that, when they ordered his liberation, his friends insisted that it should not take place until he had been carried down to the coal-hole cell which he had occupied the first day, and there photographed “through the dungeon bars” as the “martyr of the Assembly.”

Though both Victoria and New South Wales are democratic, there is a great difference between the two democracies. In New South Wales, I found not a democratic so much as a mixed country, containing a large and wealthy class with aristocratic prejudices, but governed by an intensely democratic majority – a country not unlike the State of Maryland. On the other hand, the interest which attaches to the political condition of Victoria is extreme, since it probably presents an accurate view, “in little,” of the state of society which will exist in England, after many steps toward social democracy have been taken, but before the nation as a whole has become completely democratic.

One of the best features of the colonial democracy is its earnestness in the cause of education. In England it is one of our worst national peculiarities that, whatever our station, we either are content with giving children an “education” which is absolutely wanting in any real training for the mind, or aid to the brain in its development, or else we give them a schooling which is a mere preparation for the Bar or Church, for it has always been considered with us that it is a far greater matter to be a solicitor or a curate than to be wise or happy. This is, of course, a consequence partly of the energy of the race, and partly of our aristocratic form of society, which leads every member of a class to be continually trying to get into the class immediately above it in wealth or standing. In the colonies, as in the United States, the democratic form which society has taken has carried with it the continental habit of thought upon educational matters, so that it would seem as though the form of society influenced this question much more than the energy of the race, which is rather heightened than depressed in these new countries. The English Englishman says, “If I send Dick to a good school, and scrape up money enough to put him into a profession, even if he don‘t make much, at least he‘ll be a gentleman.” The Australian or democratic Englishman says, “Tom must have good schooling, and must make the most of it; but I‘ll not have him knocking about in broadcloth, and earning nothing; so no profession for him; but let him make money like me, and mayhap get a few acres more land.”

Making allowance for the thinness of population in the bush, education in Victoria is extremely general among the children, and is directed by local committees with success, although the members of the boards are often themselves destitute of all knowledge except that which tells them that education will do their children good. Mr. Geary, an inspector of schools, told the Commissioners that he had examined one school where not a single member of the local committee could write; but these immigrant fathers do their duty honestly toward the children for all their ignorance, and there is every chance that the schools will grow and grow until their influence on behalf of freedom becomes as marked in Victoria as ever it has been in Massachusetts. Education has a great advantage in countries where political rights are widely extended: in the colonies, as in America, there is a spirit of political life astir throughout the country, and newspapers and public meetings continue an education throughout life which in England ceases at twelve, and gives place to driving sheep to paddocks, and shouting at rooks in a wheat-field.

There is nothing in the state of the Victorian schools to show what will be the type of the next generation, but there are many reasons for believing that the present disorganization of colonial society will only cease with the attainment of complete democracy or absolute equality of conditions, which must be produced by the already completely democratic institutions in little more than a generation. The squatter class will disappear as agriculture drives sheep-farming from the field, and, on the other hand, the town democracy will adopt a tone of manly independence instead of one of brag and bluster, when education makes them that which at present they are not – the equals of the wealthy farmers.

It has been justly pointed out that one of the worst dangers of democracy is the crushing influence of public opinion upon individuality, and many who have written upon America have assumed that the tendency has already manifested itself there. I had during my stay in the United States arrived at the contrary opinion, and come to believe that in no country in the world is eccentricity, moral and religious, so ripe as in America, in no country individuality more strong; but, ascribing to intermixture of foreign blood this apparently abnormal departure from the assumed democratic shape of society, I looked forward to the prospect of seeing the overwhelming force of the opinion of the majority exhibited in all its hideousness in the democratic colonies. I was as far from discovering the monster as I had been in America, for I soon found that, although there may be little intellectual unrest in Australia, there is marvelous variety of manners.

There is in our colonies no trace of that multiplication of creeds which characterizes America, and which is said to be everywhere the result of the abolition of Establishments. In Victoria, eighty per cent. of the whites belong to either Episcopalians, Catholics, or Presbyterians, and almost all of the remainder to the well-known English Churches; nothing is heard of such sects as the hundreds that have sprung up in New England – Hopkinsians, Universalists, Osgoodites, Rogerenes, Come-Outers, Non-Resistants, and the like. The Australian democrat likes to pray as his father prayed before him, and is strongly conservative in his ecclesiastical affairs. It may be the absence in Australia of enthusiastic religion which accounts for the want among the country-folk of the peculiar gentleness of manner which distinguishes the farmer in America. Climate may have its effect upon the voice; the influence of the Puritan and Quaker in the early history of the thirteen States, when manners were moulded and the national life shaped for good or harm, may have permanently affected the descendants of the early settlers; but everywhere in America I noticed that the most perfect dignity and repose of manner was found in districts where the passionate religious systems had their strongest hold.

There is no trace in the colonies at present of that love for general ideas which takes America away from England in philosophy, and sets her with the Latin and Celtic races on the side of France. The tendency is said to follow on democracy, but it would be better said that democracy is itself one of these general ideas. Democracy in the colonies is at present an accident, and nothing more; it rests upon no basis of reasoning, but upon a fact. The first settlers were active, bustling men of fairly even rank or wealth, none of whom could brook the leadership of any other. The only way out of the difficulty was the adoption of the rule “All of us to be equal, and the majority to govern;” but there is no conception of the nature of democracy, as the unfortunate Chinese have long since discovered. The colonial democrats understood “democracy” as little as the party which takes the name in the United States; but there is at present no such party in the colonies as the great Republican party of America.

Democracy cannot always remain an accident in Australia: where once planted, it never fails to fix its roots; but even in America its growth has been extremely slow. There is at present in Victoria and New South Wales a general admission among the men of the existence of equality of conditions, together with a perpetual rebellion on the part of their wives to defeat democracy, and to reintroduce the old “colonial court” society, and resulting class divisions. The consequence of this distinction is that the women are mostly engaged in elbowing their way; while among their husbands there is no such thing as the pretending to a style, a culture, or a wealth that the pretender does not possess, for the reason that no male colonist admits the possibility of the existence of a social superior. Like the American “democrat,” the Australian will admit that there may be any number of grades below him, so long as you allow that he is at the top; but no republican can be stauncher in the matter of his own equality with the best.

There is no sign that in Australia any more than in America there will spring up a center of opposition to the dominant majority; but there is as little evidence that the majority will even unwittingly abuse its power. It is the fashion to say that for a State to be intellectually great and noble there must be within it a nucleus of opposition to the dominant principles of the time and place, and that the best and noblest minds, the intellects the most seminal, have invariably belonged to men who formed part of such a group. It may be doubted whether this assumed necessity for opposition to the public will is not characteristic of a terribly imperfect state of society and government. It is chiefly because the world has never had experience of a national life at once throbbing with the pulse of the whole people, and completely tolerant not only in law but in opinion of sentiments the most divergent from the views of the majority – firm in the pursuit of truths already grasped, but ready to seize with avidity upon new; gifted with a love of order, yet ready to fit itself to shifting circumstances – that men continue to look with complacency upon the enormous waste of intellectual power that occurs when a germ of truth such as that contained in the doctrines of the Puritans finds development and acceptance only after centuries have passed.

Australia will start unclogged by slavery to try this experiment for the world.

CHAPTER VI.

PROTECTION

THE greatest of all democratic stumbling-blocks is said to be Protection.

“Encourage native industry!” the colonial shopkeepers write up; “Show your patriotism, and buy colonial goods!” is painted in huge letters on a shopfront at Castlemaine. In England, some unscrupulous traders, we are told, write “From Paris” over their English goods, but such dishonesty in Victoria takes another shape; there we have “Warranted colonial made” placed over imported wares, for many will pay a higher price for a colonial product confessedly not more than equal to the foreign, such is the rage for Native Industry, and the hatred of the “Antipodean doctrine of Free Trade.”

Many former colonists who live at home persuade themselves, and unfortunately persuade also the public in England, that the Protectionists are weak in the colonies. So far is this from being the case in either Victoria or New South Wales, that in the former colony I found that in the Lower House the Free Traders formed but three-elevenths of the Assembly, and in New South Wales the pastoral tenants of the crown may be said to stand alone in their support of Free Trade. Some of the squatters go so far as to declare that none of the public men of the colonies really believe in the advantages of Protection, but that they dishonestly accept the principle, and undertake to act upon it when in office, in order to secure the votes of an ignorant majority of laborers, who are themselves convinced that Protection means high wages.

It would seem as though we Free Traders had become nearly as bigoted in favor of Free Trade as our former opponents were in favor of Protection. Just as they used to say “We are right; why argue the question?” so now, in face of the support of Protection by all the greatest minds in America, all the first statesmen of the Australias, we tell the New England and the Australian politicians that we will not discuss Protection with them, because there can be no two minds about it among men of intelligence and education. We will hear no defense of “national lunacy,” we say.

If, putting aside our prejudices, we consent to argue with an Australian or American Protectionist, we find ourselves in difficulties. All the ordinary arguments against the compelling people by act of Parliament to consume a dearer or inferior article are admitted as soon as they are urged. If you attempt to prove that Protection is bolstered up by those whose private interests it subserves, you are shown the shrewd Australian diggers and the calculating Western farmers in America – men whose pocket interest is wholly opposed to Protection, and who yet, almost to a man, support it. A digger at Ballarat defended Protection to me in this way: he said he knew that under a protective tariff he had to pay dearer than would otherwise be the case for his jacket and his moleskin trowsers, but that he preferred to do this, as by so doing he aided in building up in the colony such trades as the making up of clothes, in which his brother and other men physically too weak to be diggers could gain an honest living. In short, the self-denying Protection of the Australian diggers is of the character of that which would be accorded to the glaziers of a town by the citizens, if they broke their windows to find their fellow-townsmen work: “We know we lose, but men must live,” they say. At the same time they deny that the loss will be enduring. The digger tells you that he should not mind a continuing pocket loss, but that, as a matter of fact, this, which in an old country would be pocket loss, in a new country such as his only comes to this – that it forms a check on immigration. Wages being 5s. a day in Victoria and 3s. a day in England, workmen would naturally flock into Victoria from England until wages in Melbourne fell to 3s. 6d. or 4s.. Here comes in prohibition, and by increasing the cost of living in Victoria, and cutting into the Australian handicraftsman‘s margin of luxuries, and reducing his wages to 4s., diminishes the temptation to immigration, and consequently the influx itself.

The Western farmers in America, I have heard, defend Protection upon far wider grounds: they admit that Free Trade would conduce to the most rapid possible peopling of their country with foreign immigrants; but this, they say, is an eminently undesirable conclusion. They prefer to pay a heavy tax in the increased price of everything they consume, and in the greater cost of labor, rather than see their country denationalized by a rush of Irish or Germans, or their political institutions endangered by a still further increase in the size and power of New York. One old fellow said to me: “I don‘t want the Americans in 1900 to be 200 millions, but I want them to be happy.”

The American Protectionists point to the danger that their countrymen would run unless town kept pace with country population. Settlers would pour off to the West, and drain the juices of the fertile land by cropping it year after year without fallow, without manure, and then, as the land became in a few years exhausted, would have nowhere whither to turn to find the fertilizers which the soil would need. Were they to depend upon agriculture alone, they would sweep in a wave across the land, leaving behind them a worn-out, depopulated, jungle-covered soil, open to future settlement, when its lands should have recovered their fertility, by some other and more provident race. The coastlands of most ancient countries are exhausted, densely bushed, and uninhabited. In this fact lies the power of our sailor race: crossing the seas, we occupy the coasts, and step by step work our way into the upper country, where we should not have attempted to show ourselves had the ancient population resisted us upon the shores. In India, in Ceylon, we met the hardy race of the highlands and interior only after we had already fixed ourselves upon the coast, with a safe basis for our supply. The fate that these countries have met is that which colonists expect to be their own, unless the protective system be carried out in its entirety. In like manner the Americans point to the ruin of Virginia, and if you urge “slavery,” answer, “slavery is but agriculture.”

Those who speak of the selfishness of the Protectionists as a whole, can never have taken the trouble to examine into the arguments by which Protection is supported in Australia and America. In these countries, Protection is no mere national delusion; it is a system deliberately adopted with open eyes as one conducive to the country‘s welfare, in spite of objections known to all, in spite of pocket losses that come home to all. If it be, as we in England believe, a folly, it is at all events a sublime one, full of self-sacrifice, illustrative of a certain nobility in the national heart. The Australian diggers and Western farmers in America are setting a grand example to the world of self-sacrifice for a national object; hundreds of thousands of rough men are content to live – they and their families – upon less than they might otherwise enjoy, in order that the condition of the mass of their countrymen may continue raised above that of their brother toilers in Old England. Their manufactures are beginning now to stand alone, but hitherto, without Protection, the Americans would have had no cities but seaports. By picturing to ourselves England dependent upon the City of London, upon Liverpool, and Hull, and Bristol, we shall see the necessity the Western men are now under of setting off Pittsburg against New York and Philadelphia. In short, the tendency, according to the Western farmers, of Free Trade, in the early stages of a country‘s existence, is to promote universal centralization, to destroy local centers and the commerce they create, to so tax the farmer with the cost of transport to the distant centers, consequent upon the absence of local markets, that he can grow but wheat and corn continuously, and cannot but exhaust his soil. With markets so distant, the richest forest lands are not worth clearing, and a wave of settlement sweeps over the country, occupying the poorer lands, and then abandoning them once more.

Protection in the colonies and America is to a great degree a revolt against steam. Steam is making the world all one; steam “corrects” differences in the price of labor. When steam brings all races into competition with each other, the cheaper races will extinguish the dearer, till at last some one people will inhabit the whole earth. Coal remains the only power, as it will probably always be cheaper to carry the manufactured goods than to carry the coal.

Time after time I have heard the Western farmers draw imaginary pictures of the state of America if Free Trade should gain the day, and asking of what avail it is to say that Free Trade and free circulation of people is profitable to the pocket, if it destroys the national existence of America; what good to point out the gain of weight to their purses, in the face of the destruction of their religion, their language, and their Saxon institutions.

One of the greatest of the thinkers of America defended Protection to me on the following grounds: That without Protection, America could at present have but few and limited manufactures. That a nation cannot properly be said to exist as such, unless she has manufactures of many kinds; for men are born, some with a turn to agriculture, some with a turn to mechanics; and if you force the mechanic by nature to become a farmer, he will make a bad farmer, and the nation will lose the advantage of all his power and invention. That the whole of the possible employments of the human race are in a measure necessary employments – necessary to the making up of a nation. That every concession to Free Trade cuts out of all chance of action some of the faculties of the American national mind, and, so doing, weakens and debases it. That each and every class of workers is of such importance to the country, that we must make any sacrifice necessary to maintain them in full work. “The national mind is manifold,” he said; “and if you do not keep up every branch of employment in every district, you waste the national force. If we were to remain a purely agricultural people, land would fall into fewer and fewer hands, and our people become more and more brutalized as the years rolled on.”

It must not be supposed that Protection is entirely defended upon these strange new grounds. “Save us from the pauper-labor of Europe,” is the most recent as well as the oldest of Protectionist cries. The Australians and Americans say, that by working women at 1s. a day in the mines in Wales, and by generally degrading all laborers under the rank of highly-skilled artisans, the British keep wages so low, that, in spite of the cost of carriage, they can almost invariably undersell the colonists and Americans in American and Australian markets. This state of degradation and poverty nothing can force them to introduce into their own countries, and, on the other hand, they consider the iron manufacture necessary for the national purpose alluded to before. The alternative is Protection.

The most unavoidable of all the difficulties of Protection – namely, that no human government can ever be trusted to adjust protective taxation without corruption – is no objection to the prohibitions which the Western Protectionists demand. The New Englanders say – “Let us meet the English on fair terms;” the Western men say that they will not meet them at all. Some of the New York Protectionists declare that their object is merely the fostering of American manufactures until they are able to stand alone, the United States not having at present reached the point which had been attained by other nations when they threw Protection to the winds. Such halting Protectionists as these manufacturers find no sympathy in Australia or the West, although the highest of all Protectionists look forward to the distant time when, local centers being everywhere established, customs will be abolished on all sides, and mankind form one great family.

The chief thing to be borne in mind in discussing Protection with an Australian or an American is that he never thinks of denying that under Protection he pays a higher price for his goods than he would if he bought them from us, and that he admits at once that he temporarily pays a tax of 15 or 20 per cent. upon everything he buys in order to help set his country on the road to national unity and ultimate wealth. Without Protection, the American tells you, there will be commercial New York, sugar-growing Louisiana, the corn-growing Northwest, but no America. Protection alone can give him a united country. When we talk about things being to the advantage or disadvantage of a country, the American Protectionist asks what you mean. Admitting that all you say against Protection may be true, he says that he had sooner see America supporting a hundred millions independent of the remainder of the world than two hundred millions dependent for clothes upon the British. “You, on the other hand,” he says, “would prefer our custom. How can we discuss the question? The difference between us is radical, and we have no base on which to build.”

It is a common doctrine in the colonies of England that a nation cannot be called “independent” if it has to cry out to another for supplies of necessaries; that true national existence is first attained when the country becomes capable of supplying to its own citizens those goods without which they cannot exist in the state of comfort which they have already reached. Political is apt to follow upon commercial dependency, they say.

The question of Protection is bound up with the wider one of whether we are to love our fellow-subjects, our race, or the world at large; whether we are to pursue our country‘s good at the expense of other nations? There is a growing belief in England that the noblest philosophy is to deny the existence of the moral right to benefit ourselves by harming others; that love of mankind must in time replace love of race as that has in part replaced narrow patriotism and love of self. It would seem that our Free Trade system lends itself better to these wide modern sympathies than does Protection. On the other hand, it may be argued that, if every State consults the good of its own citizens, we shall, by the action of all nations, obtain the desired happiness of the whole world, and that, with rapidity, from the reason that every country understands its own interests better than it does those of its neighbor. As a rule, the colonists hold that they should not protect themselves against the sister-colonies, but only against the outer world; and while I was in Melbourne an arrangement was made with respect to the border customs between Victoria and New South Wales; but this is at present the only step that has been taken toward intercolonial Free Trade.

It is passing strange that Victoria should be noted for the eagerness with which her people seek Protection. Possessed of little coal, they appear to be attempting artificially to create an industry which, owing to this sad lack of fuel, must languish from the moment that it is let alone. Sydney coal sells in Melbourne at thirty shillings a ton; at the pit‘s-mouth at Newcastle, New South Wales, it fetches only seven or eight shillings. With regard, however, to the making-up of native produce, the question in the case of Victoria is merely this: Is it cheaper to carry the wool to the coal, and then the woolen goods back again, than to carry the coal to the wool? and as long as Victoria can continue to export wheat, so that the coal-ships may not want freight, wool manufactures may probably prosper in Victoria.

The Victorians naturally deny that the cost of coal has much to do with the question. The French manufacturers, they point out, with dearer coal, but with cheaper labor, have in many branches of trade beaten the English out of common markets, but then under Protection there is no chance of cheap labor in Victoria.

Writing for the Englishmen of Old England, it is not necessary for me to defend Free Trade by any arguments. As far as we in our island are concerned, it is so manifestly to the pocket interest of almost all of us, and at the same time, on account of the minuteness of our territory, so little dangerous politically, that for Britain there can be no danger of a deliberate relapse into Protection; although we have but little right to talk about Free Trade so long as we continue our enormous subsidies to the Cunard liners.

The American argument in favor of Prohibition is in the main, it will be seen, political, the economical objections being admitted, but outweighed. Our action in the matter of our postal contracts, as in the case of the Factory acts, at all events shows that we are not ourselves invariably averse to distinguish between the political and the economical aspect of certain questions.

My duty has been to chronicle what is said and thought upon the matter in our various plantations. One thing at least is clear – that even if the opinions I have recorded be as ridiculous when applied to Australia or America as they would be when applied to England, they are not supported by a selfish clique, but rest upon the generosity and self-sacrifice of a majority of the population.

CHAPTER VII.

LABOR

Side by side with the unselfish Protectionism of the diggers there flourishes among the artisans of the Australias a self-interested desire for non-intercourse with the outside world.

In America, the working men, themselves almost without exception immigrants, though powerful in the various States from holding the balance of parties, have never as yet been able to make their voices heard in the Federal Congress. In the chief Australian colonies, on the other hand, the artisans have, more than any other class, the possession of political power. Throughout the world the grievance of the working classes lies in the fact that, while trade and profits have increased enormously within the last few years, true as distinguished from nominal wages have not risen. It is even doubted whether the American or British handicraftsman can now live in such comfort as he could make sure of a few years back: it is certain that agricultural laborers in the south of England are worse off than they were ten years ago, although the depreciation of gold prevents us from accurately gauging their true position. In Victoria and New South Wales, and in the States of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Missouri, where the artisans possess some share of power, they have set about the attempt to remedy by law the grievance under which they suffer. In the American States, where the suppression of immigration seems almost impossible, their interference takes the shape of eight-hour bills, and exclusion of colored laborers. There is no trades union in America which will admit to membership a Chinaman, or even a mulatto. In Victoria and New South Wales, however, it is not difficult quietly to put a check upon the importation of foreign labor. The vast distance from Europe makes the unaided immigration of artisans extremely rare, and since the democrats have been in power the funds for assisted immigration have been withheld, and the Chinese influx all but forbidden, while manifestoes against the ordinary European immigration have repeatedly been published at Sydney by the Council of the Associated Trades.

The Sydney operatives have always taken a leading part in opposition to immigration, from the time when they founded the Anti-Transportation Committee up to the present day. In 1847, a natural and proper wish to prevent the artificial depression of wages was at the bottom of the anti-transportation movement, although the arguments made use of in the petition to the Queen were of the most general character, and Sydney mechanics, many of them free immigrants themselves, say that there is no difference of principle between the introduction of free or assisted immigrants and that of convicts.

If we look merely to the temporary results of the policy of the Australian artisans, we shall find it hard to deny that their acts are calculated momentarily to increase their material prosperity; so far they may be selfish, but they are not blind. Admitting that wages depend on the ratio of capital to population, the Australians assert that, with them, population increases faster than capital, and that hindering immigration will restore the balance. Prudential checks on population are useless, they say, in face of Irish immigration. At the same time, it is clear that, from the discouragement of immigration and limitation to eight hours of the daily toil, there results an exceptional scarcity of labor, which cramps the development of the country, and causes a depression in trade which must soon diminish the wage-fund, and react upon the working men. It is unfortunately the fact, that colonial artisans do not sufficiently bear in mind the distinction between real and nominal wages, but are easily caught by the show of an extra few shillings a week, even though the purchasing power of each shilling be diminished by the change. When looked into, “higher wages” often mean that the laborer, instead of starving upon ten shillings a week, is for the future to starve upon twenty.

As regards the future, contrasted with the temporary condition of the Australian laborer, there is no disguising the fact that mere exclusion of immigration will not in the long run avail him. It might, of course, be urged that immigration is, even in America, a small matter by the side of the natural increase of the people, and that to shut out the immigrant is but one of many checks to population; but in Australia the natural increase is not so great as in a young country might be expected. The men so largely outnumber the women in Australia, that even early marriages and large families cannot make the birth-rate very high, and fertile land being at present still to be obtained at first hand, the new agricultural districts swallow up the natural increase of the population. Still, important as is immigration at this moment, ultimately through the influx of women – to which the democrats are not opposed – or, more slowly, by the effort of nature to restore the balance of the sexes, the rate of natural increase will become far greater in Australia. Ultimately, there can be no doubt, if the Australian laborer continues to retain his present standard of comfort, prudential checks upon the birth of children will be requisite to maintain the present ratio of capital to population.

Owing to the comparatively high prices fixed for agricultural land in the three southeastern colonies of Australia, the abundance of unoccupied tracts has not hitherto had that influence on wages in Australia which it appears to have exercised in America, but under the democratic amendments of the existing free selection system, wages will probably again rise in the colonies, to be once more reduced by immigration, or, if the democracy gains the day, more slowly lowered by the natural increase of the population.

In places where competition has reduced the reward of labor to the lowest amount consistent with the efficiency of the work, compulsory restriction of the hours of toil must evidently be an unmixed benefit to the laborer, until carried to the point at which it destroys the trade in which he is engaged. In America and Australia, however, where the laborer has a margin of luxuries which can be cut down, and where the manufacturers are still to some extent competing with European rivals, restriction of hours puts them at a disadvantage with the capitalists of the old world, and, reducing their profits, tend also to diminish the wage-fund, and ultimately to decrease the wages of their men. The colonial action in this matter may, nevertheless, like all infringements of general economic laws, be justified by proof of the existence of a higher necessity for breaking than for adhering to the rule of freedom. Our own Factory Acts, we should remember, were undoubtedly calculated to diminish the production of the country.

Were the American and Australian handicraftsmen to become sufficiently powerful to combine strict Protection, or prohibition of foreign intercourse, with reduction of hours of toil, they would ultimately drive capital out of their countries, and either lower wages, or else diminish the population by checking both immigration and natural increase. Here, as in the consideration of Protection, we come to that bar to all discussion, the question, “What is a nation‘s good?” It is at least doubtful whether in England we do not attach too great importance to the continuance of nations in “the progressive state.” Unrestricted immigration may destroy the literature, the traditions, the nationality itself of the invaded country, and it is a question whether these ideas are not worth preserving even at a cost of a few figures in the returns of imports, exports, and population. A country in which Free Trade principles have been carried to their utmost logical development must be cosmopolitan and nationless, and for such a state of things to exist universally without danger to civilization the world is not yet prepared.

“Know-nothingism” in America, as what is now styled “native Americanism” was once called – a form of the protest against the exaggeration of Free Trade – was founded by handicraftsmen, and will in all probability find its main support within their ranks whenever the time for its inevitable resuscitation shall arrive. That there is honest pride of race at the bottom of the agitation no one can doubt who knows the history of the earlier Know-nothing movement; but class interest happens to point the same way as does the instinct of the race. The refusal of political privileges to immigrants will undoubtedly have some tendency to check the flow of immigration; at all events, it will check the self-assertion of the immigrants. That which does this leaves, too, the control of wages more within the hands of actual laborers, and prevents the European laborers of the eleventh hour coming in to share the heightened wages for which the American hands have struck, and suffered misery and want. No consistent republican can object to the making ten or twenty years’ residence in the United States the condition for citizenship of the land.

In the particular case of the Australian colonies, they are happily separated from Ireland by seas so wide as to have a chance of preserving a distinct nationality, such as America can scarcely hope for: only 1500 persons have come to New South Wales, unassisted, in the last five years. The burden of proof lies upon those who propose to destroy the rising nationality by assisting the importation of a mixed multitude of negroes, Chinamen, Hill-coolies, Irish, and Germans, in order that the imports and exports of Victoria and New South Wales may be increased, and that there may be a larger number of so-called Victorians and New South Welsh to live in misery.