IMMIGRATION.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 353, 2 April 1910, Page 4

IMMIGRATION.

The chief need of all new countries is men. People create wealth, increase the productive power of the land, secure it against aggression, and develop it. Cash is useless without brawn. Brains without hands are impotent. No millionaire could effect the slightest development without human physical help, and so—the cable tells us—a Mr. Williamson is being sent out by the ''Central Unemployed Body of London" to Australia and New Zealand to ascertain the attitude of the Governments and the people towards immigration. The attitude varies very considerably. Trades unions frequently get into a ferment of excitement if half-a-dozen specific tradesmen land in a colonial city. Australia has an incalculable area of land on which ■ the foot of man never trod. Literary scaremongers point to the unpeopled Northern Territory and other huge ■wastes of South Australia, and the "Never-never" of Queensland, and mention how very easy it would be for the yellow man to take charge. It is always held among the most liberally opinion folk in Australia that wherever the yellow or black man can go and work, there also the best kind of white man can thrive and work. When Queensland wants to build a railway it does not employ Chinese—it calls on the earth's best navvies, the Britishers. That State is disposing of its Kanakas and its other colored workers, finding that even in the farthest north the white man is always the superior of the black man. And still there is a decided antipathy to organised and large influxes of neonlo. Tf the Australasian dominions could nickits immigrants, it is -nossiWe that th<"might welcome million® of them. Tf Australia and New Zealand censed to believe that the opinions of trnr!"« unionists were the only ouinions worth having in resnect to the T>enr>ling of emntv lands, both countries would receive a larger share of the great s+rpnm that continuously flows from Great. Britain and the Europoan State* towards the United States and Canada, Tf it can be proved that a sv«tem of "race-suicide" is in progress in these, the youngest of all new countries, itfollows that to hold them against nro•lifie races we must obtain population from outside. The nre=">n+ Populations of Australia an<l Npw Zealand. depending onlv on the natural increase, can only deal with the merest fringe of the

land available, for ninety per cent, of the available resources of Australasia arc not touched. Immense areas are held by a few people, when the fact is .that such areas would support tens of thousands of folk. 'The Central Unemployed Body of London" will not sound well to the average colonial, because it seems reasonable to him that a man who cannot fight himself into a job at Home may possibly lean heavily on a State in which he is a stranger and of which he knows nothing. To dump an unemployed Londoner down in the wastes of Australia might be a good experiment, but this is problematical. To introduce the Cockney unemployable to the rough country of Now Zealand would seem very like courting disaster. Tn both undeveloped countries it is commonly very difficult" to "find enough land" for the native-born requiring it. Tf either country, unable to deal with the present land-hunger of people who knoAT something of working it, is able to settle strangers who know nothing of farming, there would obviously be discontent. Both countries urgently require added -population, but neither has any definite plans for dealing with newcomers. What would New Zealand do if two hundred thousand London unemployed threw their bundles down on Dominion soil within the next twelve months?