DOMINION NEEDS CAPITAL.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 303, 17 May 1911, Page 7

DOMINION NEEDS CAPITAL.

IMMIGRANTS WILL FOLLOW. The Vice-Consul General of the United States, Mr. H. D. Baker, who is now in Wellington, thinks the people of New Zealand are very capable and go-ahead in a great many ways. "It is wonderful," he says, "to observe the way in which they have made use of refrigeration to develop their frozen meat industry. They have shown originality—a good deal of it, too." Mr. Baker added that he thought that one of the great things necessary here was the introduction of outside capital. He thought that capital was more necessary than immigration. "Get capital first, and the laborers will follow," was his idea. "The prosperity of the United States is due chiefly to the large amount of capital which we have got—in the first place chiefly from England, but now our own. There are so many largo enterprises competing with one another, and they have to get good men, and the wages of such men tend to go up. Take all the big railroads between Chicago and New York. All arc competing against one another for good men, and the consequence is that wages are high. Capital would help the country more than a liberal immigration policy. Immigration is a thing which will regulate itself. In tlie States we do not encourage—in Tact, we tax immigrants. Nevertheless, people are flocking in. And the reason is that wages are high, and attract people to the country, and the reason of wages being high is that there is so much active investment of capital, so much enterprise. The humorous things is that the people here who have got money have not got their capital invested in their own country—they seem to think England is a safer place."—Dominion.