DANGER—KEEP OUT!

Observer, Volume XL, Issue 8, 25 October 1919, Page 3

DANGER—KEEP OUT!

Inhospitality

THE average person without any financial genius to help him, wearily observes that New Zealand is about to spend a few more million pounds per year on something or other and wonders how we do it. He knows in a general kind of way that a country containing fewer people than a second class city in an old land has at sonic time or other to foot the bill; that six million, pounds worth of gratuities are to be paid out, that a million pounds a year must shortly be spent in Navy—and so on and so forth.

He will agree that New Zealand is a very wonderful country—or it might be better said that the few people who are in New Zealand are very wonderful people indeed to produce value enough from a limited area to pay present bills and to arrange for subsequent debts. If he thinks hard enough he will be perfectly certain that there is no possible hope of the present meagre population of New Zealand paying the enormous sums we owe. What then?

He has seen that large numbers of the best young New Zealanders have brought to this new country from the old countries, wives who will become New Zealanders and who will bear young New Zealanders —and he knows that the infusion of new blood is the finest thing that can happen to the Dominion. But he is also aware that the tiny population is being only slowly augmented and that quite the larger part of New Zealand is not being used in any useful way.

We have on the one hand, Mr. Gunson, Mayor of Auckland, telling Americans that New Zealand has supplied eighty thousand repatriated soldiers with jobs and on the other, the State telling the Imperial Government (which offers to send young British men out free) that it can't be hospitable to Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotsmen, or Welshmen, till its own soldiers have been adequately attended to. It is cold comfort. The time will yet arrive when New Zealand will not only welcome as many British people as will voluntarily enter this country but will compete with Australia, South Africa, the Argentine and other undeveloped countries for the privilege of having them. > * * * The cold reply of the New Zealand Government to the suggestion from the Imperial Government will put back immigration. Immigrants are required not only to aid the sparse population in tilling the country, but in helping us to pay the enormous debts we owe. Immigration is wanted to make ns become as important as we. feel, immigration is wanted to teach us that the country belongs to the Empire and not to a few people who appear to believe that increased prosperity can be assured by keeping anybody else from coming here. The point is that people, not of our own race, will ultimately come without being invited unless we are. strong enough to keep them out. We emphatically are not .strong enough unaided, and the only way we can become strong enough is in encouraging by every means in our power people to come to New Zealand from the breeding place of the race. * * * The disposition of colonial people to live in towns is one of the chief reasons for inviting folk to come hero with, the intention of settling on the land, for full towns and an ■empty country mean national suicide. The truth of this may be tested any time Auckland is blockaded from the sea, and the egress of its citizens cut off. It needs little imagination to understand the relative importance of fields and bricks and mortar as matter for sustenance. * * * One small thing may prevent some people from coming to New Zealand. If an English person finds he can get a grant of a mile of country in Canada for nothing and hears that a farm was lately sold in Taranaki for one hundred and eighty pounds an acre, it is unlikely that he will come to New Zealand, even though the inhospitable Government overcomes its antipathy to British people and invites them to share in the development of a great country which must be developed sooner or later, no matter what colour the developers niav be. ** * ■ One would almost believe the politicians would welcome a large influx of population on the ground that politicians, now relatively unimportant personages, would increase in magnificence as the population grew. With, say a population of four millions in New Zealand, Mr. Massey would be almost as important a person as the Chairman of the London County Council, or the Mayor of Paris. As it is he commands fewer people than are in a London suburb, which is a sad state of affairs, remediable by throwing the gates of New Zealand wide open to British people and inviting them to come in in droves. The British people have made their own homes wherever they have gone in the centuries and it is possible that immigrants would find their own level as immigrants did in the pioneering days of this country and of Australia. The dog in the manger policy of keeping the country we can't possibly use, to ourselves will react. Someday we may wake up and find we havn't got a country and that it belongs to the other gentleman who took no notice of Mr. Massey's signboard, "Danger—Keep out!"