Migration and Materials

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 69, 14 December 1935, Page 30

Migration and Materials

- TALI ANS and Germans constantly point to the British Empire as | illustrating the inequitable distribution of the world’s resources | Suppose” (comments Sir Norman Angell), ‘‘we could transfer half, or J. even for that matter the whole of those overseas territories to Italy. Germany or Japan. Would the fact solve, or greatly help to solve, their population or industrial problems? If so, why does not the ‘possession’ of those territories solve ours? For we, too, have our population problem. 2,000,000 unemployed, in a country little more self-sufficient than Italy and with a density of population far greater. The assumption is (the statement is constantly being made by Italians and Germans) that we have an Bmpin to go to. But have we? We do not possess rights to emigrate to our Overseas Dominions. This is a fact which most foreigners can somehow never be Drought to believe—the fact that in matters touching tariffs and immigration the Dominions are not subject to the Imperial power. And, if they were, ii would not help us. For the Dominions have their own unemployed, and to Hood their labour markets with immigrants would make matters worse. The only things which as agricultural colonists they could produce would be things of which the world has already a surplus. Even where it is possible to impose emigrants upon a colony, as in the ease of African crown colonies, rhe relief which they afford even in the best circumstances to surplus popula tion is, in fact, a drop in the ocean.

•‘Nationalists once bitten with the colonial microbe seem immediately to part company with the simplest arithmetic and all sense of reality; Italians talk of planting 10,000,000 Italians in Abyssinia. Test such expectations in the light of past Italian, German or Japanese experience. While Japan, like Italy, has talked of the needs of expansion, she lias possessed for 40 rears colonial territories of relatively sparse population. Yet in those 40 years those sparsely populated territories have taken less than one year’s increase of the Japanese population. The reasons that have dissuaded the Japanese from a real colonisation of Korea and Formosa (the presence of ' a native population of a low standard of life) will operate still more powerfully in the case of Manchuria.

“As with Japan, so with Germany. Despite intense propaganda which bad "one on for a generation about the need for a colonial outlet for Germany’s redundant population, there were, on the eve of the War. more Germans earning their livelihood in the city of Paris than in all the German colonies in the whole world combined. Properly to appreciate that fact will help to get the colonisation problem in its right perspective.

“The Italian showing in the matter of colonisation is even worse. After fifty years of ownership, in the 2000 square miles of territory in Eritrea most suitable for European residence there were at the last census just about 400 Italians. Of the whole Italian population, numbering less than 5000, over 3000 were returned as residents of the capital, and when we have deducted government employees, children under ten, we find the total Italian population engaged in agriculture to be 84 persons. If Italy manages to plant in Abyssinia the same proportion of whites to natives that exist in Africa as a whole, she might manage to find room at the most for some 20,000 Italians. Multiply by ten and the population question has not been touched.

“AS to the raw material argument, there is no struggle in an economic sense for raw material because the world has usually far too much of it; every State producing raw material is asking nothing better than to get rid of it. Germany fed a large part of her population before the War with the food of overseas territory which she did not need to own. The process could have been and. would have been indefinitely extended, but for the War. The difficulty is not that raw material is withheld in peace time but that economic nationalism so upsets the apparatus of exchange that potential resources cannot be purchased. He-shuffling of frontiers does not remedy that dislocation. "Britain built her greatest export trade upon raw material poduced in a foreign State. It would not have helped to save the British cotton trade if the sources of raw material had been in the Soudan or India rather than Louisiana. ‘Ownerships’ would not have enabled us to obtain the cotton for nothing, or necessarily indeed any cheaper; nor materially have facilitated the mechanism of economic change by which we pay for it. We cannot secure nickel or asbestos from Canada for nothing. We have to pay for these things like any German, or Italian, or Japanese. And if Germany or Italy or Japan were to conquer Canada the new ‘owners’ would still have to pay for these filings as we do.

“The real advantage, as the real purpose of having raw material within political control, lies not in any normal peace time economic need, but in military war time need. The underlying impulse is political and military, not economic. 'To state the case thus simply often creates great irritation, and provokes the retort that everybody knows it and it is not the point. It would be nearer the truth to say that very few statesmen know it and that it is the point. Britain’s contribution is not to ‘give away the Empire’ (which in any ease she would not do) but Io reverse those tendencies to an economically closed Empire which gratuitously create economic causes for war where none need exist.”