Labourers for the co-operative works, I should have stated, are recommended by the local agencies of the Labour Department, and are selected on the principle that applicants not previously employed have priority of claim over those who have recently had employment; that men resident in the neighbourhood of the works have priority over { 113} non-residents, and that married men have priority over single men; while the qualifications of the men as workmen and their personal characters are naturally taken into consideration. During the five years of its existence, the Labour Department has found employment for nearly 16,000 men; of the 2,781 men assisted during the year ending March, 1896, 2,163 were sent to Government works. Under the control of the Labour Department is a State Farm, in the province of Wellington, at which unemployed are received for a few weeks or months, and, having saved a few pounds, are enabled to seek work elsewhere. The farm is specially adapted for young, able-bodied men who have been brought up as clerks and shop assistants, but, owing to the stress of competition, have been thrown out of employment. Many of them would be prepared to undertake manual labour, but lack the necessary experience. At the farm they would be able to obtain in a short time sufficient knowledge to render them capable of accepting work for private employment. The Secretary of the Department of Labour, Mr. Tregear, maintains that the farm has proved its usefulness and should be supplemented by similar institutions in the other provinces. Since the last annual report, I understand, the Government have decided, as the land has been improved to a point which renders it impossible to employ any considerable number upon it profitably, to dispose of it, and to remove the workmen { 114} to fresh areas of uncleared land. They hope to recoup themselves for their whole expenditure, but will not necessarily be convicted of failure should they fail to do so, as the undertaking was started on a charitable, and not on a commercial, basis. It aimed at the assistance of the genuine unemployed, and was not intended to become a refuge for confirmed loafers. On this point Mr. Tregear writes, and his views are those of the working men of New Zealand: "I am more and more impressed with the necessity that exists of establishing farms which shall be used as places of restriction for the incurably vagrant atoms of the population. The State Farm does not and should not fulfil this purpose; it is for the disposal and help of worthy persons, unsuccessful for the time, or failing through advance in years. What is required is a place of detention and discipline. There exists in every town a certain number of men whose position vibrates between that of the loafer and the criminal: these should altogether be removed from cities. The spieler, the bookmaker, the habitual drunkard, the loafer on his wife's earnings, the man who has no honest occupation, he whose condition of 'unemployed' has become chronic and insoluble--all these persons are evil examples and possible dangers. Such an one should be liable, on conviction before a stipendiary magistrate, to be removed for one or two years to a farm, where simple food and clothes would be found for him { 115} in return for his enforced labour. The surroundings would be more healthy, and open-air life and regular occupation would induce more wholesome habits and principles than the hours formerly spent in the beer-shop and at the street-corner, while the removal from bad companionship would liberate from the pressure of old associations. He would, on his discharge, probably value more highly his liberty to work as a free man for the future, and, as the State would have been to no cost for his maintenance, it would be a gainer by his temporary removal from crowded centres. There need be no more trouble than before in regard to the sustentation of the restricted person's family, as such a vagrant is of no use to his family, but only an added burden. While for the honest workman, temporarily 'unemployed,' every sympathy should be shown and assistance to work given, for the other class, the 'unemployable,' there should be compulsory labour, even if under regulations of severity such as obtain in prisons."[5] New Zealand has a justification for penal colonies lacking in older countries in the fact that the genuine unemployed can obtain assistance from the Government to enable them to settle on the land, either through the Co-operative Works or the Improved Farm Settlements.