| <The Saturday Review November 8, 1862>
| <Miss Rye's Emigrants>
| <pb n="566">
| A few weeks ago we ventured to make some remarks 
| upon Miss Rye's project for the emigration of women 
| of the middle class.  It was a matter of painful 
| surprise to us to find that our article upon "The Export 
| Wife-trade" had excited very ungentle emotions in the 
| bosoms of some of our fair readers.  The article was 
| intended to warn Miss Rye and her supporters against 
| some dangers which seemed to us very imminent.  
| We could not but express a fear that they were 
| undertaking to supply a market with which they were 
| imperfectly acquainted; and that, in attempting to 
| dispose of our superfluity of educated women by 
| furnishing colonial bachelors with wives, they might 
| be involuntarily incurring dangers which they were 
| very far indeed from contemplating.  But Micaiah is 
| in all ages a very unpopular character.  Our 
| suggestions drew down upon us a storm of invective, 
| whose fury only those who are familiar with feminine 
| controversy will be able to appreciate.  It is a terrible 
| thing to incur the wrath of philanthropists; and a 
| controversy with the softer half of creation is 
| notoriously a dangerous undertaking.  But when 
| benevolence of profession and gentleness of sex are 
| combined in the same antagonist, a mere ordinary 
| man of the world has no resource but to surrender at 
| discretion.  No purely secular nerves can be expected 
| to withstand the vituperation which female 
| benevolence pours out on those who meddle with its 
| chimeras.
| It is not, therefore, with any foolhardy intention of 
| provoking another onset of female pens that we 
| venture to recur to this dangerous subject.  We are 
| emboldened to do so only by the circumstance that we 
| have been happy enough to make a convert, and that 
| convert is no less a person than Miss Rye herself.  
| Her original scheme was to provide an outlet for 
| distressed governesses, by sending them to the 
| colonies, in the hope that some at least of them would 
| get employers, and that most of them would get 
| husbands.  They were to be sent out on speculation.  It 
| was argued, <hi rend="italic"> a priori, </hi> that 
| Australian young ladies required education, and 
| Australian young men required wives; and that, if 
| educated young women who were in want of money 
| could be persuaded to allow themselves to be 
| consigned to the Australian ports, they would find a 
| ready market for their talents in one capacity or the 
| other.  As a mere sum in political economy, an 
| exercise in the rule of supply and demand, this 
| calculation made a tolerable appearance upon paper.  
| In fact, there were only two objections to it.  One was, 
| that the people who need education are not always the 
| people who desire it; and the other was, that 
| matrimony is not, even in the colonies, contracted 
| upon principles so purely mercantile as Miss Rye and 
| her estimable coadjutors appeared to imagine.  Few 
| settlers can afford, or think they can afford, the luxury 
| of a governess, and therefore the majority of 
| Australian young ladies must complete their 
| education in some other way.  The demand, 
| accordingly, for governesses is limited and 
| precarious; and women who go out on speculation, 
| with no definite certainty of employment, will, in 
| most cases, be disappointed.  Their chances of 
| marriage would be still more precarious.  They would 
| be too fastidious to be content to take a digger or a 
| labourer for a husband; and the young men of their 
| own class would be too fastidious to take them for 
| wives.  Englishmen of any education like to know 
| something of the antecedents and connexions of the 
| women they marry.  It is rather an adventurous 
| proceeding to bind yourself for better for worse to a 
| lady of whom you know nothing whatever, except 
| that she was <reg orig="No"> Number </reg> 36 in 
| Miss Rye's last emigrant ship.  For the governess 
| class of emigrants, therefore, marriage is an even 
| more precarious reliance than employment.  If Miss 
| Rye had proceeded with her scheme as it was 
| originally explained to the world, numbers of those 
| whom she sent out must have been driven to depend 
| for bare subsistence upon the liberality of others.  We 
| cannot regret that we have called the attention of the 
| promoters of the scheme to these dangers in language 
| which has compelled their attention.  It is easy to 
| compliment enthusiasts upon their good intentions, 
| but nine-tenths of the harm that is done in the world is 
| done by well-meaning people.  Those who voluntarily 
| assume to shape the destinies of others must bring 
| something more than good intentions to the work.  
| They are bound to make themselves certain, by 
| adequate inquiry, that the promises by which they 
| persuade others to risk their whole welfare are not 
| mere figments of their own imaginations.  If their 
| sentimental ignorance is in reality deluding others to 
| ruin, they must be exposed as unsparingly as if they 
| were consciously wrong-doers.
| Such censure, however, we are glad to say Miss Rye 
| deserves no longer.  The objections which both 
| English and colonial writers have made to her first 
| project have roused her to a sense of the dangers it 
| involved.  She acknowledges now, that <q> </q>.  So 
| strongly has she now become impressed with the evils 
| of <p> "sending out governesses by hundreds," </p> 
| that she is going herself to the colonies to spend a 
| year and a half there, to ascertain the real extent of the 
| demand that exists for that class of labour, and to 
| make arrangements, under which, in future years, it 
| can be supplied without risk.  For the present, the 
| middle-class emigration scheme is practically 
| abandoned.  It has been superseded by the more 
| sensible plan of exporting the class of women for 
| whom both employers and husbands can be found 
| without difficulty.  Out of four hundred who have 
| been sent out, only forty were governesses; and out of 
| a hundred whom she is taking herself, only eight are 
| governesses.  The remaining nine-tenths belong to the 
| classes who live by the labour, not of their minds, but 
| of their hands, and for whose services there is a 
| steady and abundant market.  The Australian colonies 
| form an admirable provision for the two extremes of 
| the social scale, but (speaking generally) for none 
| between.  There is no better place for those who can 
| take with them some capital to invest, or for those 
| who can work with their hands.  But for the 
| intermediate class, who have received too high an 
| education to be fit for annual labour, and yet have no 
| capital to invest, the colonies offer but a doubtful and 
| speculative subsistence.  The rule holds good of either 
| sex.  Miss Rye thinks it necessary to apologize for her 
| change of plan.  She wishes it to be understood <p> 
| "that she alone is responsible" </p> for taking out the 
| class that will succeed, and leaving the class that 
| cannot possibly succeed behind.  The patrons of the 
| former scheme, who have a sentimental contempt for 
| facts, and look upon them as the suggestions of a 
| coarse mind, probably find it hard to stomach the 
| change.
| <pb n="567">
| But there is no help for it.  Neither in the colonies nor 
| elsewhere can any outlet be found for the enormous 
| overflow of that class of women who have been 
| brought up to look on manual labour as ungenteel.  
| Their distresses will not cease until the conventional 
| barrier which shuts them out from self-support is 
| broken down.  The demand for the mental services of 
| women scarcely exists except in old and wealthy 
| countries, and in those it has long ago been 
| over-supplied.
| Miss Rye incidentally makes a curious addition to the 
| already abundant illustrations which the men of 
| Manchester have given of their humanity.  If ever 
| there was a case for emigration, it is that of the 
| factory-girls who are unemployed.  Even if the 
| American war were to conclude to-morrow, it is 
| probable that a very long time would elapse before 
| the whole number of hands that are out of work 
| would regain their employment.  Cotton will not be so 
| abundant as it has been for years; capital has been 
| wasted; machinery has deteriorated; and it is now 
| very generally agreed that the production of the last 
| few years, even if it were possible to resume it, has 
| been largely in excess of the demand.  As a matter of 
| humanity, therefore, it is of the last importance that 
| the most helpless class of the factory-hands should be 
| provided for by emigration.  Miss Rye is fully 
| sensible of the necessity, and so are the girls 
| themselves.  In one month she has had applications 
| from two thousand of them.  According to the law, 
| the Poor Law Guardians have the power of assisting 
| emigration out of the rates; and if they do so now, 
| they might stop up a source of pauperism which will 
| trouble them for many a long year.  Yet they have not 
| only refused to assist Miss Rye, but have thrown 
| every obstacle in her way.  They are afraid ~~ such is 
| Miss Rye's account of their motives ~~ that some of 
| their best mill hands may leave them.  They prefer to 
| inflict on them all their present suffering, and all the 
| degradation to which a long continuance of it may 
| drive them, rather than risk the occurrence of this 
| slight drawback in case the cotton prosperity should 
| revive.  They cannot get rid of the notion that these 
| factory girls are <p> "hands," </p> not human beings.  
| They are merely a portion of the machinery by which 
| cotton fortunes are made.  As such they are to be 
| preserved from actual starvation; but they are with 
| equal care to be held back from any improvement of 
| their condition which shall render them unavailable 
| for the future manufacture of calico.  The guardians 
| are, probably, strong opponents of slavery; but it is 
| only the slavery which is imposed by direct 
| enactment.  The force of circumstances, stronger than 
| law, binds these unhappy girls to the soil on which 
| they live, and the employment to which they have 
| been brought up; and the guardians decline the 
| exercise of their legal owners, rather than help to free 
| them from the practical serfdom.  The mill-owners, it 
| seems, will not bate one jot of the calculation by 
| which their human machines are to yield them the 
| largest possible profit for the smallest possible outlay.  
| As they closed their mills that they might be freer to 
| speculate in the raw material, instead of working it up 
| ~~ as they withhold subscriptions, in order to force a 
| grant from the Exchequer ~~ so they resist 
| emigration, lest they should have to pay for the 
| mitigation of present distress by some slight 
| deduction from their future profits.