Industrial England has a Surplus of Men and Money

TO understand why settlers should travel all the way to New Zealand in small sailing ships, to a land that was hardly known, where farms would have to be carved out of virgin forest or wind-swept tussock, one has to consider the England of the years before 1840. England all through the eighteenth century was enjoying an expanding prosperity. New methods of agriculture were at once making landowners richer and displacing farm labourers. At the same time the great Industrial Revolution was going forward. This, the beginning of large-scale coal-mining and factory production as we know it, was making a few men immensely rich, while others found themselves forced into the hideous new industrial towns to compete for a few jobs.

England was in fact like a well-stocked cake shop with a herd of hungry small boys outside who had no pennies to spend. There was a surplus of labour, which meant social unrest of the sort we to-day know and dread as Unemployment. Then the employers, though they made lots of money, found it difficult to invest their profits in other enterprises. The pressure of circumstance dictated that men should go overseas to produce in new, empty lands where capital too could be used profitably.