Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1933 EMPIRE SETTLEMENT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 53, Issue 285, 13 September 1933, Page 4

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1933 EMPIRE SETTLEMENT.

It is not surprising that Commissioner Lamb, the Salvation Army authority on Empire migration, should use vigorous terms in his references to the subject. Speaking at Leicester, the Commissioner, it is reported by cablegram, asked what scientists were doing with the resources of the Empire, in view of the rich tracts awaiting development, whose vacancy menaced the Empire's stability and tempted other over-crowded nations. Could the British Association say how we could build up an Empire when there were 40,000 more men than women *in Queensland, which had room for 100,000, and while Britain was maintaining millions of idle able-bodied men at Home. It is'many years since the Commissioner roundly declared that, unless the Empire wants to forfeit that which has been so hardly won, it must immediately develop strenuous, continuous and elastic migration. There are two aspects of this question —Britain's domestic need, accentuated by the financial drain of a vast sum spent in what the Commissioner describes as demoralising doles to the unemployed, and the oversea territories' need of population. Both aspects, however, combine into one urgent necessity when a full view of them is taken. It is the necessity for effective means to distribute the British population of the Empire, so that congestion in the Homeland, accompanied by stress, may be relieved, while at the same time the thinly occupied areas abroad may have more secure and adequate settlement. Success depends upon the choice of right means. The Empire has sufficient resources for the task. Its people are the best colonisers in the world. If the wit and the will to grasp the situation be forthcoming, a memorable British achievement will be registered before long. The Commissioner has consistently advocated the group settlement system, which is certainly one of the directions in which the problem may be attacked. History abounds with instances of its success'. It has been the normal method of peopling new regions. It was followed in the ageold occupation of Britain by our own Anglo-Saxon forefathers. It gave the world the United States. Here and there where British rule now runs a beginning was made by "plantations" that were in every considerable respect group settlements. New Zealand's colonising owed much to the method. As the outposts of the Empire became established, the need for this community migration was not so pressingly felt by colonists. There arose conditions making solitary ventures less hazardous, and the initial way of settling afield in clusters was neglected. But it still has all its old advantages and it might be revived with success. While life on the frontiers of settlement necessitates hard work, the group system fosters a spirit of satisfaction and hope. There can be no doubt of the merit of the scheme in mitigating the sense of loneliness in a strange land that is so often a foreboding and so a hindrance to migration. Nor can it be doubted that the established companionship it transfers to new circumstances is a factor of promise. It aids also the transplanting of the domestic and social elements of life that have gone far to make British colonisation the fine thing it has been for both the Empire and the world.