Apr. 27.
TUERE are great possibilities in the Bill shortly to be introduced into the House of Commons embodying the recommendations of the Dominion Prime Ministers on the question of reinforcing our sparsely populated Colonies with British set-tiers. In the past, emigration has been conducted, if it can be said to have been conducted at all, in haphazard fashion, and with results leaving much to be desired both on the part of the settler and the Government of his choice. Now it is proposed that the Home and Colonial Goyernments shall combine in a great scheme of social regeneration and Imperial strength, a scheme which aims at filling the pty spaces of the Dominions skilled and well equipped settlers capable—of developing the vast industrial resources at present untouched. Tt is a fascinating project and, if attempted on broad, comprehensive lines, should go far towards solving political and industrial problems of vital urgency which have come into the foreground since the wa By way of initial expenditure, the British Government proposes to set aside £2,000,000 annually for the project, on condition that the Dominions subscribe a like amount, and it is to be hoped that so much, and eventually a great deal more, will be voted for work which gives great promise of solid results.
The problem before the framers of the Bill will be to devise means of sending the right type of settler to those parts of the Dominions where their labour will be most fruitful and where also, in the political interests of the Empire, their presence is most necessary. In this respect, Australia assumes a position of supreme importance, both indus. trially and politically. From the point of view of Great Britain, a scheme of ce-operative emigration on a large scale offers undoubted attractions as affording an outlet for an over-crowded labour market. There can be no question of merely dumping a mass of unskilled labour on the Colonies. There must be careful selection and training, equally with a view to strengthening colonial industrial forces and of giving the new Colonist a real chance of success. Too often it has happened that, unaided, he has succeeded only in being a failure. The agricultural production at least of the Dominions is usually in the hands of big landowners possessed of large Capital. The small landowner with no Capital worth mention usually finds that he is lucky if he can even make a bare living. Yet it is usually the small landowner that the immigrant is destined to be. He has been buoyed up by delusive reports and visions of a paradise: he finds on the contr: 2 purgatol The fault does appear not rest with him but with the system which pitches him into a two hundred acre lot of undeveloped land, with nothing to live upon till he has developed it. This is what we imagine the projected Bill is designed to cure.
can be done, but organization is needed and particularly the active cooperation of the Dominion Governments.
Apparently, the framers of the Bill have in mind only the industrial classes, and no doubt this attitude is based on full appreciation of the difficulty of fitting the middle classes into the scheme. With the burden of tion pressing heavily upon them, and overcrowding of the professions causing a renewal of the old question: What shall we do with our sons? the middle classes might well look to the colonies for & solution of some of their difficulties. But the new field would have to be scanned with vision and courage. There can be no real place in the colonies for that type of post-war young man, increasing in number, who seeks the maximum of social comfort with the minimum expenditure of mental and physi ical effort. If young colonists are to be drawn from this class, they must be prepared to adopt new standards, and above all they must be prepared to work. Tt sounds unromantic, and possibly will not appeal to those young gentlemen who have failed to find openings in the three great preserves of the middle classes, the Church, the Army and the Law, but the Dominions, sensitive as they are now on all Jabour and social questions, have nothing to offer to the man who is not prepared to take an active personal share in the productive work of the commonwealth. It would be an excellent achievement, fraught with the most beneficial results
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.