The Press Friday, January 29, 1926. Empire Migration.

Press, Volume LXII, Issue 18602, 29 January 1926, Page 8

The Press Friday, January 29, 1926. Empire Migration.

It will be a great Empire tragedy if the Australia Day speech of the Prince of Wales remains a sensatioji only in the newspapers. What his Hoyal Highness said has been said before, but it has not been better said before, or said at a more appropriate time, or by anyone more likely to be listened to. The " stream of men, women> and children "going to the Dominions" is the hope of the Empire, which will continue rich and strong only if the stream can be maintained for another generation at least, and in the meantime enormously increased. Although the migration pessimist is as big a nuisance as the pessimist in Home trade and agriculture, it is no use blinding our eyes to the fact that the Homeland since the ivnv has spent three hundred million pounds in supporting men and women who cannot or will not support themselves. A half or a quarter of this stupendous sum would have transported tens of thousands of good British citizens from Counties which have no room for them to Colonies and Dominions in which their value would

have been beyond computation economically, socially, and strategically. It is not pessimism to suggest that if we cannot learn, Homeland and Dominions alike, to spend our treasure more wisely, our troubles will increase until pessimism will be justifiable. For it is not merely that all this money has been wasted economically: it has been wasted morally, since a very large number of Britain's enormous army of unemployed have sunk into shiftless and thriftless ways from which they will probably never again escape. And there is the rising generation to be considered. Every day in the year something ■ like a' thousand boys and girls leave school to look for work, and he is a dull pet-son who does not realise , what must happen if Britain has to wait a second seven years after the war before she is in a position to employ them. One of the helpful things the members of our local Imperial Mission have done has been to direct attention to the possibilities of boy and girl migration, if boldly and intelligently handled. But there is of course no particular kind of migration that in itself •will solve the Empire's problems. There must be every kind of rich and poor, rural and urban, adult and adolescent, and even in many cases of the aged. So far as New Zealand is concerned there is not very much room for mass migrations, but-the ease is quite different in Australia and Canada. Not one quarter of the arable land of Canada has so far been occupied, and of those settlers" who contrive somehow to find their way there, a vei'y large proportion are not British. Australia, in spite of the advice of wellmeaning but ignorant outsiders, keeps to British stock, but has added to its population so slowly that it still has no more than a fifth of the -white people it must haVe before it is even reasonably safe-in a military sense. In those two vast territories at' least there is not only room but the most urgent demand for the arrival of whole colonies, fanners and farm-labourers predominating, but artisans,' shopkeepers, doctors, lawyers, and teachers being equally flecessftry. ItwaS pointed out by .somebody in one of the recent debntes on this great question in the House of Commons that Tvhen a Greek State became overcrowded a colony was organ-

ised by the leading tfleti of the community, who, after much formality and' due religious ceremonies, hived off and established a new 1 State elsewhere. But it is not necessary to go to Greece for examples of this all-inclusive migration, Our own Empire) has given the world finer examples of that kind of thing than any Empire in history, and •what has been done so often can be done -again. The only difference is that it will have to be done on a grander and bolder scale than ever before, and that is what the Prince of Wales meant by his reference to the day "when we will be able to smile with "satisfaction at the obstacles sur- " mounted."