THE UNEMPLOYMENT QUESTION.

Otago Witness, Issue 3774, 13 July 1926, Page 22

THE UNEMPLOYMENT QUESTION.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —During the last few months we have had the unemployment question constantly before us. According to the general belief unemployment is caused by a too liberal immigration policy. Some time ago I was reading an article on the subject. The writer declared that even if there was no immigration the same trouble would exist. Take England, for instance. There is no immigration into that country. The position there is the reverse. Every year many thousands of the labour classes leave England for the dominions. Yet in spite of this exodus of workers, which, one would think, would make a serious shortage, the unemployment trouble is as rife there as at former times. In 1903 there was an acute period of unemployment in England. The late General Booth, of the Salvation Army, who, a former Prime Minister of Great Britain once said, was the only one in England who could solve the unemployment question, in that year wrote a pamphlet in which he recommended emigration as the oply means of relieving England of her surplus unemployed.—l am, etc., Reader. Dipton, Southland, July 8.