The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 1914. IMMIGRATION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXIX, Issue 71, 15 July 1914, Page 4

The Stratford Evening Post WITH WHICH IS INCORPORATED THE EGMONT SETTLER. WEDNESDAY, JULY 15, 1914. IMMIGRATION.

The great boom in immigration which for so long has been steadily maintained in Canada has ended very abruptly, and for the first time in Canada's history the emigration figures have exceeded the immigration, and hundreds of European laborers are returning to their old homes. The cable messages further announce that the Government has ceased advertising for immigrants, and lias issued a warning that , only settlers with money, intending to go on the land, will bo welcomed. It is not so very long ago since much publicity and praise was meted out to the enterprise of the Canadian-Pacific Railway in providing ready-made farms for immigrants, and every sort of inducement seems to have been oifered to attract population. During the last dozen years or so thousands of people from the United Kingdom. Ireland and Europo every year flocked to the Dominion, all sorts and conditions of men being welcomed with open arms. As a result there is now in Canada a great surplus of unskilled labour and probably a large element of this is really unemployable. That the policy of attracting white people to fill up her waste places was a thoroughly good one on Canada's part, no one will deny, but the trouble seems to Lave arisen through the want of discrimination in tho quality of the people admitted. That Canada's present difficulty will soon pass is certain, and when her Government again looks for immigrants it i s certain that the door will not be thrown so widely open as in the past. Canada will, doubtless, in future stand with those countries which oppose the unrestricted admission to their shores of indigent and wholly ignorant persons, which may turn out a burden on the community. What exactly is to happen to the great surplus population of Europe, whih has hitherto, in steady streams, flowed westward to the American Continent, remains a dark and disturbing problem of the future.