We have noticed with much interest and a good deal of sympathy criticisms in the leading Shanghai Papers on the unfortunate announcement by the "Daily Mail" of September 23, suggesting that there was an opening for business women at Singapore and Shanghai, and adding that in the latter town "there is a considerable demand for really competent and capable} women in clerical capacities." You only probably see distant echoes of the damage done by a paragraph of this nature. Here we know a good deal more about its real significance, Every week there roll up to organizations like the China As sociation crowds of people who apparently think that China and Japan are an El Dorado. They include both women and men. They want to go as clerks, as secretaries, as typists, as business managers, and they go to the extent of assuming that there are jobs simply waiting for them, because they usually ask "what salaries they ought to demand." One girl has actually gone out to Japan quite recently as a nurse to the children of a: Japanese, because she thinks that Japan is teeming with business openings for white women. Nor is this all, unfortunately. Manual®workers are now thinking that there is a chance for them also, and you get people like engine drivers calling to ascertain whether there is any specific opening for their services in Shanghai.
The China Association wisely turns down anybody and everybody, but it is about time that someone put an. authoritative warning in the papers, since without doubt many leave on the off-chance and without securing prior advice. They do not go apparently to Singapore and the Straits Settlements, because the public here does understand that employment is at its lowest ebb in that Colony, but we never have a word about China or Japan to dissuade the person who thinks that, because there is little to do at home, there must be plenty of work available overseas.
It is a thankless job nowadays advising anybody who wants to emigrate. I. suppose that Australia looks after its emigrants the best of anyone, but recently there have been bitter complaints that the ex-service men who have gone out in considerable numbers have not managed to make good. This,! however, is not the fault of the! Australian Government. It checks; its emigrants to the very of i its ability, but is cannot dissuade people from going who wish to go, and there is no doubt that many'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.