EMPIRE MIGRATION

Wairarapa Daily Times, 7 October 1936, Page 5

EMPIRE MIGRATION

A HEIGHT ON A BRITISH PROBL. EM- ' \. rtress Association Electric Teletzranb — QorrJ'Tfctt LONDON, Tuesday. The “Morning Post,” in 3 leader Ott migration, says:— “Hitherto it has been customary to speak of the necessity for filling the Dominions’ empty spaces from our own. surplus, but the moment is approaching when the Empire will be compelled to review the whole problem in a new light, because in a very few years, so far from having a surplus, we shall ourselves be suffering a decline in population. “Can Britain therefore afford to suffer an additional diminution through migration lest her man-power resources become dangerously weak? In other words, ought, we to encourage renewed migration until our birth-rate shows a sustained and substantial rise? You can fill up the Empire only out of a continuing surplus, and now that no surplus is being produced either in Britain or the Dominions, the problem has begun to wear, an entirely different aspect. “Clearly the solution is more babies, and that subject ought to engage the anxious attention of any future Imperial Conference.”

It may be imagined by some people in the Dominion that there is a, shortage of land in Great Britain for subdivision, and that this is one reason why people should be induced to go overseas to go on the land. This is quite an erroneous impression. There are vast estates in the British Isles, and in support of that contention a subscriber of the “Dannevirke News”:quoted an advertisement in a recent issue of the “Farmers'’ Weekly,” an English publication, of an estate seven miles from Bedford, which was to be let. The total area of this “farm,” for thus it was referred to in the advertisement, was 559,803 acres, comprising 279,312 acres of arable land, 272,118 acres in pasture, apart from another 8373 acres which were not described. On this vast farm there was an “excellent house and buildings and seven cottages. ”