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Updated: June 26, 2025
A. Bowden, manager of the Tákwá and Abosu Mines, also employs a 'mixed multitude. His Sierra Leone carpenters and blacksmiths draw 3l. 10s. to 4l. 10s. per month without rations, and his native mechanics 3l. to 3l. 10s. The Fanti labourers are paid, as usual, a shilling per diem and find themselves. This state of the labour-market is, I have said, purely provisional.
Labourers thus obtained may in some respects be inferior, from want of skill, and even from want of strength. But our Highland countrymen have recommendations in their sober and orderly habits, which are not to be found in some of their competitors in the labour-market.
The only white resident is Mr. Julio, who has led a rather accidented life. A native of St. Helena, he fought for the Northerners in the American war, and proved himself a first-rate rifle-shot. He traded on the Congo, and travelled like a native far in the interior. Now he has married a wife from Cape Palmas, and is the leading man at Tabú. This place, again, is a favourite labour-market.
If the labour-market were permanent in its demand, exactly proportioned to the existing numbers, and yet elastic enough to meet the movement of population, this would be an excellent plan; but as it is, it may be doubted whether there is not in a system which restricts the locomotion of the workman, the germ of a great evil, both to the class to which he belongs and to the cause of general progress.
Before proceeding to expound the various duties thus imposed upon the employer, the writer lays down a primary duty as essential to the due performance of the rest namely, he must see to making his business succeed; and for this end he must possess a sufficient capital at starting; and he must not, for any reasons of vanity or benevolence, or through laxness, pay higher wages than the state of the labour-market and the prospects of trade require.
How the farmers swore and the labourers chuckled when he took all the cottages into his own hands and rebuilt them, set up a first-rate industrial school, gave every man a pig and a garden, and broke up all the commons 'to thin the labour-market. Oh, how the labourers swore and the farmers chuckled, when he put up steam-engines on all his farms, refused to give away a farthing in alms, and enforced the new Poor-law to the very letter.
But we feel no apprehension of such a result. There is now no democracy to be fooled into a new excitement in favour of a Whig ministry, or to be cheated by a cry of cheap bread, counteracted as it must be by the contemplation of lower wages, and an increased competition in the labour-market.
This plan, many of them succeeded in carrying into execution, much to the disappointment and annoyance of the community at whose expense they had been brought to the Colony; and it was reasonably complained, that these men, in place of supplying the labour-market, as was intended, actually created an increased demand for labour, by requiring aid in their own operations before the first twelvemonth had passed over them.
Whatever be the result to those who go, there are indications that the labour-market is bettered for those who stay; in connection with which a noteworthy fact may be mentioned, which is, that in the southern, western, and midland counties, scarcely an Irish labourer is to be seen; and who is there that does not remember what troops of the ragged peasantry used to come over for haymaking and the harvest?
They begin afresh as the tillers of a virgin soil, fattened too often with the ashes of burnt homesteads, and the blood of the slain. Another element of comfort may have been the fact, that in the rough education of the forest, only the strong and healthy children lived, while the weakly died off young, and so the labour-market, as we should say now, was never overstocked.
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