DO DOMINIONS

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVI, Issue 11, 24 December 1925, Page 15

DO DOMINIONS

WANT BRITISH BOYS? Why is it that the idea of emigration attracts tlie schoolboy .so little to-day ? This problem (says st writer in the “Sunday Express”) caused no little perturbation at a recent headmasters’ conference, and one headmaster, who. bad just returned from a tour of Canada, went so far as to say that “the very qualities that have earned for Englishmen the name of empirebuildcrs are most conspicuously absent in the youth of 1925.” Emigration officials are less gloomy, and |.K>int with pride to the numbers ol schoolboys who have left this country for the Dominions. Yet. undoubtedly, these numbers could be enormously increased. | The boys themselves confess that they are not certain what they will find in the Dominions. “1 am not going to the other side of the world.” said a sixteen-year-old lad to me, “unless 1 am sure that life there is going to be better than it is here. Even if things arc jiretty rotten in England, T must be sure they arc better in the Dominions before I leave all my family and friends and go away for an unknown number of years.” The following extracts from the letters of a schoolboy emigrant to New Zealand should go far io reassure lads in a similar frame of mind : - “If T liked to walk away from my presnt job I could get a new one novj at 30/- a week and board at last. . You see, a man can get £1 a day working with a shovel in a stone quarry. ‘J.’ saw me driving horses th<- other day, and ho said I could get £3 10 - a 1 week and my board any <|;iy of the ' year. Money <:an be made out here. . and I am writing to ‘J.’ and ‘T.’ to tell I them to come out. ' “I found out what share-milking is , to-day. The owner of the cow gets I three-filths of the cheque, and you get ' two-filths. Two of you milking about ' eighty or ninety cow.s would get any--1 hing from £25 io £3O a month each?’