COLONISING CRUSADE

Waikato Times, Volume 123, Issue 20693, 31 December 1938, Page 6

COLONISING CRUSADE

In his appeal for an increased birth rate and a more serious attempt to people the empty spaces of the Dominions “for the highest Imperial reasons,” Mr Ramsay MacDonald, Dominions Secretary, has sounded a warning that must be heeded by the British Empire in the coming year. It is not enough to claim possession of a quarter of the earth’s surface and to hold a monopoly of the world’s potential riches. Those riches must be released for the service of mankind or they will be lost. The most striking argument that the British race is decadent is the fact that it cannot or will not people its own lands. It has all the resources and all the facilities necessary to build an incomparably greater Empire; why does it not do so 7

Mr MacDonald says Britain must devise a policy that will increase the birth rate or else the island will not alone be able to supply the immigration population needed for the development of the Dominions. This is a pointed indication of his opinion that the Dominions are incapable or unwilling themselves to supply the need by an increased birth rate or by attracting and accommodating foreign immigrants. New Zealand in this respect is perhaps the weakest of them all. Although it is the most favoured Empire country, with almost every imaginable natural advantage, it does nothing to supply its most obvious and freely admitted need. Is its statesmanship so frail or its courage so lacking that it cannot break through the inertia that has bound it for years and begin afresh a colonising crusade 7 Even poor Italy with all its disadvantages has had the courage to attack the problem and pour a horde of colonists into a far less hospitable land with undoubted prospects of success. The organisation of the great migration to Abyssinia has startled the world into a realisation of what might be done. Even if Italy fails it will be only because her colony does not possess the riches in natural resources upon which the British Empire broods inactively. But Italy most probably will not fail; nor is there any reason why the British Empire should fail if it acts with equal initiative and determination to succeed.