University of Virginia Library

“The struggle between the labourers in Kent and the farmers who locked them out has ended in the men's departure for New Zealand. The men, it will be remembered, struck against a reduction of wages, and were then locked out till they should abandon the Union. The farmers believed that, under the pressure of the hard times, they would yield; but the younger men determined to emigrate, and introduce into the colony the cultivation of Kentish hops. The Government of New Zealand, which prefers this class of emigrants to all others, readily agreed to assist them, and on Wednesday six hundred emigrants, most of them young men, the pick of the country-side, started from Maidstone for the Antipodes. . . The men, according to the Daily News, all plead the absence of any prospect of “getting on.”— Spectator, Feb. 1, 1879.