The Press FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1938. Empire Settlement

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22592, 23 December 1938, Page 8

The Press FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1938. Empire Settlement

A cable message to-day reports the interesting fact that the House of Commons, without a division, adopted a Conservative member’s motion urging the Government, with the Dominions, to consider “ all practicable plans ” to promote the settlement of British emigrants and calling upon it to “ co-operate in approved “ schemes.” The Secretary of State for the Dominions, announcing the Government’s readiness to accept the terms of the motion, made two points in support of it. If the British people did not develop the new and young countries, they could be reproached with “ sit- “ ting on a vast area of the earth’s surface and “ preventing its beneficial use and to make the Dominions more prosperous and powerful was “ perhaps the best way of augmenting the “ strength of Britain itself.” Mr Mac Donald said a little more, promising that the Government would make larger grants for settlement, if necessary, and looking forward to the settlement of “ much larger populations ” in the Dominions. “ Millions of additional settlers ” was his hopeful phrase; but he used it skilfully, because he used it to enforce a timely warning. Advocates of large-scale Empire settlement, especially by immigration from Great Britain, must realise that they cannot consistently demur if the Dominions expand their secondary production. Mr Mac Donald said, very pointedly, that he regarded such expansion as “ not merely an essential but the “ principal part of the policy of Dominion de- “ velopment.” He cannot have been ungrateful for the present opportunity to stress this fact. It enabled him to correct the misinterpretation of his recent remarks on headlong nationalism in the Dominions. It also assists him in dealing with the more thoughtless protests against New Zealand’s control policy, and may assist him equally to open the Dominion Government’s hand, now firmly shut against immigration. It is to be assumed, of course, that the British Government would not have accepted the motion unless it were prepared to open negotiations and to press towards action. It must be admitted that the problem is complex and difficult, and that the attitude, for example, of Mr Savage and his colleagues, willing to say the right thing but unwilling to do it, is by no means the most troublesome factor. More fundamental are such difficulties ao the following. First, the old, automatic incentives to emigration no longer operate, or operate much less powerfully. The English worker is no longer attracted by an obviously higher standard of living in the Dominions, or by obviously superior economic and social opportunity. Nor does it seem likely that conditions will so rapidly and markedly change as to revive this motive. Second, the prospect of a fall in the British population figures is now so clear that it constitutes a strong argument against any large-scale transfer, if it could by any means be promoted. Moreover, the objection is strongest against the transfer of precisely such emigrants as the Dominions would most readily accept, as best fitted to produce and reproduce. Dr. Enid Charles, in 1935, estimated that if fertility and mortality in England and Wales remained at the 1933 level, the population would fall from a maximum of 40,885,000 in 1943 to 38,504,000 by 1975 and to about 20,000,000 by 2035. Calculation on another assumption—of fertility and mortality rates following the course of decline shown in the years 1925-1935—gave the maximum figure of 40,655,000 in 1940 and a fall, by 1975, to 31,452,000. Although such figures are estimates only, and estimates based on assumptions, they carry a warning which statesmen cannot ignore or defy. And the warning to Great Britain’s statesmen is that they face the extraordinary problems, industrial and social, of a declining population. The unemployment, for example that may be caused by what Mr Keynes calls “breakdown of effective demand,” as a consequence of decline, is only one of a series of problems of dislocation and readjustment. Third, it follows that the trade relations of the Empire, the volume and classification and direction of its trade and therefore the character and distribution of production, must be profoundly modified by large movements in the population figures; and policy, if it is to achieve the purposes of useful control and adaptation, must be formed and calculated in the light of observed and duly interpreted facts, as well as towards considered and desirable ends. The interests of the Dominions in attracting fresh population are hardly to be questioned. New Zealand, for instance, suffers gravely from under-population; but the birth-rate has fallen from 40:1000, as it was 60 years ago, to 16.2 in 1935 and 16.6 in 1936, when Kuczynski calculated that the net reproduction rate was below replacement rate. Imperially, it is no less Great Britain’s interest to see the,Dominions’ population expand, and to promote the expansion; but the obvious means of promoting it—not so practicable as it is obvious—is not at all so advantageous. It is hardly surprising that adventurous thinkers, such as Mr R. A. Piddington, in his book, “The Next British “Empire,” should be leaping the hurdles to a future when Great Britain will,, by a mass transfer, strategic, financial, industrial, abandon a weakened position on the Channel and the North Sea and re-establish herself on the Pacific. In the meantime, the value of the short debate and the decision in the House of Commons is that Empire settlement becomes a present and real issue, and that its problems will be thoroughly searched.