John
Stuart Mill:
“On Colonies and Colonization” (1848)
If
it is desirable, as no one will deny it to be, that the planting of colonies
should be conducted, not with an exclusive view to the private interests of
the first founders, but with a deliberate regard to the permanent welfare of
the nations afterwards to arise from these small
beginnings; such regard can only be secured by placing the enterprise, from
its commencement, under regulations constructed with the foresight and
enlarged views of philosophical legislators; and the government alone has
power either to frame such regulations, or to enforce their observance.
The
question of government intervention in the work of Colonization involves the
future and permanent interests of civilization itself, and far outstretches
the comparatively narrow limits of purely economical
considerations. But even with a view to those considerations alone, the
removal of population from the overcrowded to the unoccupied parts of the
earth's surface is one of those works of eminent social usefulness, which
most require, and which at the same time best repay, the intervention of
government. To appreciate the benefits of colonization, it should be
considered in its relation, not to a single country, but to the collective economical interests of the human race. The question is
in general treated too exclusively as one of distribution; of relieving one labor
market and supplying another. It is this, but it is also a question of
production, and of the most efficient employment of the productive resources
of the world.
Much
has been said of the good economy of importing commodities from the place
where they can be bought cheapest; while the good economy of producing them
where they can be produced cheapest, is
comparatively little thought of. If to carry consumable goods from the places
where they are superabundant to those where they are scarce, is a good pecuniary
speculation, is it not an equally good speculation
to do the same thing with regard to labor and instruments? The exportation of
laborers and capital from old to new countries, from a place where their
productive power is less, to a place where it is greater, increases by so
much the aggregate produce of the labor and capital of the world. It adds to
the joint wealth of the old and the new country, what amounts in a short
period to many times the mere cost of effecting the
transport. There needs be no hesitation in affirming that Colonization, in
the present state of the world, is the best affair of business, in which the
capital of an old and wealthy country can engage.
It
is equally obvious, however, that Colonization on a
great scale can be undertaken, as an affair of business, only by the
government, or by some combination of individuals in complete understanding
with the government; except under such very peculiar circumstances as those
which succeeded the Irish famine. Emigration on the voluntary principle
rarely has any material influence in lightening the pressure of population in
the old country, though as far as it goes it is doubtless a benefit to the
colony. Those laboring persons who voluntarily emigrate are seldom the very
poor; they are small farmers with some little capital, or laborers who have
saved something, and who, in removing only their own labor from the crowded
labor market, withdraw from the capital of the country a fund which
maintained and employed more laborers than themselves. Besides, this portion
of the community is so limited in number, that it might be removed entirely,
without making any sensible impression upon the numbers of the population, or
even upon the annual increase. Any considerable emigration of labor is only
practicable, when its cost is defrayed, or at least advanced, by others than
the emigrants themselves.
Who
then is to advance it? Naturally, it may be said, the capitalists of the
colony, who require the labor, and who intend to employ it. But to this there
is the obstacle, that a capitalist, after going to the expense of carrying
out laborers, has no security that he shall be the person to derive any
benefit from them. If all the capitalists of the colony were to combine, and
bear the expense by subscription, they would still have no security that the
laborers, when there, would continue to work for them. After working for a
short time and earning a few pounds, they always, unless prevented by the
government, squat on unoccupied land, and work only for themselves. The
experiment has been repeatedly tried whether it was possible to enforce
contracts for labor, or the repayment of the passage money of emigrants to
those who advanced it, and the trouble and expense have always exceeded the
advantage. The only other resource is the voluntary contributions of parishes
or individuals, to rid themselves of surplus laborers who are already, or who
are likely to become, locally chargeable on the poor rate. Were this
speculation to become general, it might produce a sufficient amount of
emigration to clear off the existing unemployed population, but not to raise
the wages of the employed; and the same thing would require to be done over
again in less than another generation.
One
of the principal reasons why Colonization should be a national undertaking, is that in this manner alone, save in highly
exceptional cases, can emigration be self-supporting. The exportation of
capital and labor to a new country being, as before observed, one of the best
of all affairs of business, it is absurd that it should not, like other
affairs of business, repay its own expenses. Of the great addition which it
makes to the produce of the world, there can be no reason why a sufficient
portion should not be intercepted, and employed in reimbursing the outlay
incurred in effecting it. For reasons already given, no individual, or body
of individuals, can reimburse themselves for the expense; the government,
however, can. It can take from the annual increase of wealth, caused by the
emigration, the fraction which suffices to repay with interest what the
emigration has cost. The expenses of emigration to a colony ought to be borne
by the colony; and this, in general, is only possible when they are borne by
the colonial government.
Of
the modes in which a fund for the support of colonization can be raised in
the colony, none is comparable in advantage to that which was first
suggested, and so ably and perseveringly advocated, by Mr
Wakefield: the plan of putting a price on all unoccupied land, and devoting
the proceeds to emigration. The unfounded and pedantic objections to this
plan have been answered in a former part of this chapter: we have now to
speak of its advantages. First, it avoids the difficulties and discontents
incident to raising a large annual amount by taxation; a thing which is
almost useless to attempt with a scattered population of settlers in the
wilderness, who, as experience proves, can seldom be compelled to pay direct
taxes, except at a cost exceeding their amount; while in an infant community
indirect taxation soon reaches its limit. The sale of lands is thus by far
the easiest mode of raising the requisite funds. But it has other and still
greater recommendations. It is a beneficial check upon the tendency of a
population of colonists to adopt the tastes and inclinations of savage life,
and to disperse so widely as to lose all the advantages of commerce, of
markets, of separation of employments, and combination of labor. By making it
necessary for those who emigrate at the expense of the fund, to earn a
considerable sum before they can become landed proprietors, it keeps up a
perpetual succession of laborers for hire, who in every country are a most
important auxiliary even to peasant proprietors: and by diminishing the eagerness
of agricultural speculators to add to their domain, it keeps the settlers
within reach of each other for purposes of co-operation, arranges a numerous
body of them within easy distance of each center of foreign commerce and
non-agricultural industry, and insures the formation and rapid growth of
towns and town products. This concentration, compared with the dispersion
which uniformly occurs when unoccupied land can be had for nothing, greatly
accelerates the attainment of prosperity, and enlarges the fund which may be
drawn upon for further emigration. Before the adoption of the Wakefield
system, the early years of all new colonies were full of hardship and
difficulty: the last colony founded on the old principle, the Swan River
settlement, being one of the most characteristic instances. In all subsequent
colonization, the Wakefield principle has been acted upon, though
imperfectly, a part only of the proceeds of the sale of land being devoted to
emigration: yet wherever it has been introduced at all, as in South
Australia, Victoria, and New Zealand, the restraint put upon the dispersion
of the settlers, and the influx of capital caused by the assurance of being
able to obtain hired labor, has, in spite of many difficulties and much
mismanagement, produced a suddenness and rapidity of prosperity more like
fable than reality.
The
self-supporting system of Colonization, once established, would increase in
efficiency every year; its effect would tend to increase in geometrical
progression: for since every able-bodied emigrant, until the country is fully
peopled, adds in a very short time to its wealth, over and above his own
consumption, as much as would defray the expense of bringing out another
emigrant, it follows that the greater the number already sent, the greater
number might continue to be sent, each emigrant laying the foundation of a
succession of other emigrants at short intervals without fresh expense, until
the colony is filled up. It would therefore be worth while,
to the mother country, to accelerate the early stages of this progression, by
loans to the colonies for the purpose of emigration, repayable from the fund
formed by the sales of land. In thus advancing the means of accomplishing a
large immediate emigration, it would be investing that amount of capital in
the mode, of all others, most beneficial to the colony; and the labor and
savings of these emigrants would hasten the period at which a large sum would
be available from sales of land. It would be necessary, in order not to
overstock the labor market, to act in concert with the persons disposed to
remove their own capital to the colony. The knowledge that a large amount of
hired labor would be available, in so productive a field of employment, would
insure a large emigration of capital from a country, like England, of low
profits and rapid accumulation: and it would only be necessary not to send
out a greater number of laborers at one time, than this capital could absorb
and employ at high wages.
Inasmuch
as, on this system, any given amount of expenditure, once incurred, would
provide not merely a single emigration, but a perpetually flowing stream of
emigrants, which would increase in breadth and depth as it flowed on; this
mode of relieving overpopulation has a recommendation, not possessed by any
other plan ever proposed for making head against the consequences of increase
without restraining the increase itself: there is an element of
indefiniteness in it; no one can perfectly foresee how far its influence, as
a vent for surplus population, might possibly reach. There is hence the
strongest obligation on the government of a country like our own, with a
crowded population, and unoccupied continents under its command, to build, as
it were, and keep open, in concert with the colonial governments, a bridge
from the mother country to those continents, by establishing the
self-supporting system of colonization on such a scale, that as great an
amount of emigration as the colonies can at the time accommodate, may at all
times be able to take place without cost to the emigrants themselves.
The
importance of these considerations, as regards the British islands, has been
of late considerably diminished by the unparalleled amount of spontaneous
emigration from Ireland; an emigration not solely of small farmers, but of
the poorest class of agricultural laborers, and which is at once voluntary
and self-supporting, the succession of emigrants being kept up by funds
contributed from the earnings of their relatives and connections who had gone
before. To this has been added a large amount of voluntary emigration to the
seats of the gold discoveries, which has partly supplied the wants of our
most distant colonies, where, both for local and national interests, it was
most of all required. But the stream of both these emigrations has already
considerably slackened, and though that from Ireland has since partially
revived, it is not certain that the aid of government in a systematic form,
and on the self-supporting principle, will not again become necessary to keep
the communication open between the hands needing work in England, and the
work which needs hands elsewhere.
Source:
From:
John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ed. J. Laurence
Laughlin, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1891), pp. 540-560.
Scanned
by Jerome S. Arkenberg, Cal. State Fullerton. The
text has been modernized by Prof. Arkenberg.
|