The reckless
drafting off of our social failures into new lands is a criminal policy,
which has been only too rife in the State-aided emigration of the past,
and which is now rendered more and more difficult each year by the
refusal of foreign lands to receive our "wreckage." Here, then, is the
crux of emigration. The class we can best afford to lose, is the class
our colonies and foreign nations can least afford to take, and if they
consent to receive them they only assume the burden we escape. The age
of loose promiscuous pauper emigration has gone by. If we are to use
foreign emigration as a mode of relief for our congested population in
the future, it will be on condition that we select or educate our
colonists before we send them out. Whether the State or private
organizations undertake the work, our colonizing process must begin at
home. The necessity of dealing directly with our weak surplus population
of low-skilled workers is gaining more clear recognition every year, as
the reluctance to interfere with the supposed freedom of the subject
even where the subject is "unfree" is giving way before the urgency of
the situation.
Sec. 4. Mr. Charles Booth's "Drainage Scheme."--The terrible examples our
history presents to us of the effects of unwise poor law administration,
rightly enjoin the strictest caution in contemplating new experiments.
But the growing recognition of the duty of the State to protect its
members who are unable to protect themselves, and to secure fair
opportunities of self-support and self-improvement, as well as the
danger of handing over their protection to the conflicting claims of
private and often misguided philanthropy, is rapidly gaining ground
against the advocates of _laissez faire_.
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