why a damper has come over the Port Philip market,
reducing amongst other things the price of wages by nearly a third.
Emigrants continue to pour in, and they stare and are grievously
disappointed at the rate of wages, so very different to that which they
expected. Twelve months since, a single labouring man got forty pounds per
annum, with weekly rations of provisions; now with his rations, he
receives only twenty-five, or at most thirty pounds per annum. Married men
with young families will not be hired at any rate, for they are only
burdens on a station. A good thorough-bred shepherd maintains his price.
He is still in great demand, and may command from sixty to seventy pounds
per annum, with rations, cow's milk, free hut, and a portion of produce of
stock in addition to all, if he chooses to put his wages to that mode of
profit. Women servants were formerly much wanted. They are now at a
discount. The filthy drabs ejected from Ireland are scarcely worth their
meat. I am proud to say it, and you should be proud to hear it, gentle
Christopher, that a Scotch servant, male or female, is forty per cent
above every other in value in this colony. Scotch servants get ahead in
spite of every thing. The Scotch tradesmen have almost all of them made
money; some abundantly. I have met many here from the North who brought
nothing but their energy, moderation, and unconquerable perseverance with
them, and they are affluent, and are becoming daily more so. Donald ----,
who was a servant lad at home, and is now a respected and respectable man
in Melbourne, is independent. He went first to Van Diemen's Land, and came
here some three years ago. "And had you arrived," he said to me the other
day, "at the same time, you might now have been moving home a prosperous
gentleman." However, _nil desperandum_. There is still a fair opportunity
for an industrious man, who above all things has resolution to be SOBER in
his habits. The mischief with the labouring man has been, that having
suddenly discovered his wages to be high in comparison with those he
received in the mother country, he has considered himself entitled to have
a proportionate extra amount of enjoyment at the public-house, where drink
is very high. Good tradesmen would infallibly make money, but for this
great failing. The bullock dray-drivers, certainly the best paid of all
the working men, absolutely think nothing of coming from the Bush into
Melbourne, with twenty or thirty p