Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/45

relief of the labour market. Emigration caused by starvation pressure is not a healthy outlet for labour; if it is Government-aided, helpless, thriftless folk flock to it for a while, and starve on the other side; if land is given, capital is wanted by the emigrant, for before he can eat his own bread, he must clear his land of timber, plough or dig it, sow his corn, and wait for his harvest; if he goes out poor, on what is he to live during the first year? Men with £300 or £400 of capital may find more profitable investment for it in the West in America, or in our colonies, than at home, but their outgoing will not much relieve the labour market. Emigration for penniless agricultural labourers, and for artizans, means only starvation abroad instead of at home. And it is starvation under worse conditions than they had left in the mother-country; they have to face vicissitudes of climate for which they are utterly unprepared, extremes of heat and of cold which try even vigorous constitutions, and simply kill off underfed, half clothed, and ill housed new comers. Nor is work always to be had in the New World. No better proof of the foolishness of emigration to the United States can be given, than the fact that, at the present time, contractors in England are in treaty with American workmen, with the object of bringing them over here. Unskilled labour does not improve its chances by going abroad. Nor is skilled labour in a better position, for here the German emigrant undersells the British; he can live harder and cheaper, and has had a better technical education than has fallen to the lot of his British rival. One great evil connected with emigration is the disproportion it causes between men and women, both in the old country and in the new, those who emigrate being chiefly males. Nor must it be forgotten that when England colonised most, her population was far smaller than it is at the present time; physical vigour is necessary for successful colonising, and the physical vigour of our labouring poor deteriorates under their present conditions; as the Canadian roughly said at the meeting of the British Association at Plymouth: "the colonies don't want the children of your rickety paupers." Colonization needs the pick of a nation, if it is to succeed, not the poor who are driven from home in search of the necessaries of life. John Stuart Mill points out how inadequate emigration is as a continued relief to population, useful as it is as a sudden effort to lighten pressure; he remarks that the great distance of the fields of emigration prevents them