Dumping Undesirables.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 20, 13 May 1908, Page 47

Dumping Undesirables.

CANADA AND THE NEEDY IMMI GRANT.

Canada is beginning to realise at last that the New Zealand policy of selecting the assisted immigrants instead of allowing a motley horde of undesirables to pour in, is the best after all. Mr. Rudyard Kipling showed his ignorance of social problems whes« he told the Canadians recently to “pump in the immigrants from the Old Country.” The problem is not quite so easy as all that. Mr. -Bruce Walker, late Canadian Emigration Agent in Lortdon, points out in a recent report that the emigrants sent to Canada by the Salvation Army and other charitable societies in London are for the most part “morally and physically quite unsuited” for colonial requirements. England for some years past has been dumping into Canada her social refuse—thousands of poor wretches who have been squeezed into poverty and destitution in the horrible struggle for existence in the Old Country. Canada has at last had enough of this process. She says that henceforth-she can afford to pick and choose. She does not want England’s failures, the weak, the inefficient and the wastrels. Physically they are too' weak to stand the hard work of developing new territory; their mental and moral fibre is equally deficient. It is cruel to dump them down in a new country where they are no use either to themselves or to the country. If the dumping process were continued long enough, Canada would presently have on her hands a mass of poverty and degradation. reproducing all the worst features of the Old Country. Already thera is congestion in Candian cities, due to reckless and ill-advised emigration from the Motherland. Now the Canadian Government has stepped in, and from April 15 no emigrant can be shipped to Canada by the aid of charitable or public funds without the consent of the Superintendent of Immigration for Canada ia London.

As in the case of New Zealand, the Canadian Government want to encourage the immigration of agricultural labourers, real navvies, and domestic servants. But the men and women that Canada is willing to receive are just those whom England can ill spare. It is a bad look-out for the Old Country if the colonies are to drain it of the best elements in its working classes, leaving behind all the idlers and inefficients to fester and breed in city slums. On the other hand it is absurd to expect any of the colonies to open their arms to receive the refuse of the Mother Country. The only logical way out of the impasse —the only humane and commonsense way —is for England to grapple with this question of poverty with courage and determination—qualities which have so far been painfully lacking in the treatment of the greatest of social problems. The colonies will be ready enough to receive Englishmen who are physically and mentally “fit.” England’s task is to level up her lower classes. But this she will never do until she developes a social conscience, and offers to her millions of poor not charity, but justice.