NEED OF IMMIGRANTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 June 1938, Page 3

NEED OF IMMIGRANTS

THE FIVE MILLION CLUB'S PROPOSALS. (To the Editor.) Sir, —A Wellington paper points out that the Five Million Club would only consider foreign immigrants in view of the possibility of being unable to obtain immigrants from Britain. Well, well, even the Five Million Club may soar to dizzy heights in generosity, and we are to be given every chance to populate the Dominion with immigrants of our own stock; we have been well warned, and if the country be flooded with stolid Nordics, then we have only ourselves to blame. Who, and what, are the Five Million Club, and what are their aims and objects? Who constitutes its personnel, and are their motives entirely disinterested? I should like some enlightenment on these questions, for, at the moment, I am rather suspicious. What has chiefly aroused my suspicions is the club's report, an unduly large section of which is devoted to the general inability to obtain a sufficiency of domestic servants. This latter is a question which might easily be settled within our own shores, for I am confident the material would be forthcoming by the adoption of humane treatment of domestics, and the general abandonment of the seven and six per week, upstairs and downstairs attitude of the employers. The Government now in office has been responsible for many social reforms. So far, however, nothing has been heard of \ the question of the domestic servant; let the employment of these people be placed on a humane footing, and we shall hear less of the Five Million 'Club, a lot of whose members seek an influx of immigrants in order to obtain cheap labour.

The question of increasing the Dominion’s man-power, or woman-pow-er as far as that goes, is, I believe, one far beyond the scope of the Five Million Club, and it is moreover a twoedged sword. Personally, I think the Government is very much alive to the dangers of a static population, but at the same time I do not think they are to be stampeded into panic measures by any reports of a Five Million Club. Above all. let- us keep the Dominion British. If we are to lose it. at least let us make a fight for- it, and I can assure you that I for one would gladly die in its defence. — Yours, etc., POPULUS. Masterton, June 8.