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 work, 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 Zea- land, which prefers this class of immigrants 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. Two hundred had gone before, five weeks ago ;. and England has, therefore, lost perhaps half a regiment,—five hundred men, every one of -whom will, in about two years, draw out two or three families, or perhaps a whole village. The emigration is good for the world, and perhaps even for England, or rather for the people who live in it, who are better as well as happier at the Anti- podes than living here, on wages which are not sufficient to allow of civilised life ; but it is impossible not to regret such losses, which a different tenure of the soil would as we believe, prevent. The men, according to an eye-witness, who writes in the Daily 216W8, all plead the absence of any prospect of "get- ting on."
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