Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, JULY 1, 1938. PEOPLING THE EMPIRE.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 1 July 1938, Page 6

Wairarapa Times-Age FRIDAY, JULY 1, 1938. PEOPLING THE EMPIRE.

too much is taken for granted by the British Oversea Settlement Board in some passages of the report of which a cabled summary was published yesterday. The report says, for instance, that if the present population trend continues, the Empire’s (white) population will become stationary and then diminish rapidly. Old, and aged persons will increase, leaving a smaller proportion of active persons to carry on the work. From the days of Malthus onward, many predictions relating to population, and many theories on the subject, have been falsified. Some allowance has to be made for fluctuations in the life of nations, and of empires, as well as in the lives of individuals. It is not to be denied, however, that the Dominions, and not least New Zealand, are inadequately populated from the point of view of general security and of reasonable stability in economic development. Without believing that the Empire is already on the road to, doddering decay and early extinction, thinking people in the Motherland and in the Dominions may very easily agree that the time is ripe, or more than ripe, for a great combined effort—a continuing campaign—directed to the more effective occupation of the overseas Empire. Judging by the cabled summary, there is nothing particularly sensational, or for that matter particularly enlightening, in the report of the British Oversea Settlement Board. Amongst other things, it suggests that Britain may not be able to supply sufficient settlers, and therefore recommends the Dominions “additionally to admit a carefully regulated flow of foreigners of assimilable types, preferably from countries whose inhabitants are of the same stock as ourselves.”

The cablegram observes that this is the first time in the history of Britain in which it has been suggested that the Dominions should absorb foreigners. In fact, however, the Dominions before the war were freely absorbing foreigners of many races, and in a settled world might be expected to do go again in natural order. Not a few thoroughly acceptable citizens of New Zealand today were born in European or other foreign countries, and many more are descendants of such immigrants.

It remains true, however, that the adequate peopling of the Empire is primarily a problem for the British nation, and that if the problem is to be attacked boldly and with method, co-operation to that end between the different sections of the British nation is essential.

The condition of success, or even of a successful beginning, in attacking the problem of peopling the Empire, as it now presents itself, is that secondary issues and sectional interests should be set aside. Without going over ground that has been traversed again and again, it should be possible to agree that schemes of land settlement. are not a hopeful means of building up greater populations in the Dominions. Apart from the slow progress that is always and inevitably made in schemes of the kind, the development, even of Dominions with a less ill-balanced economy than our own, is lop-sided on account of their undue dependence on primary production, and therefore on world markets which would be something less than satisfactory even if they were not, as they are at present, seriously inadequate.

Any rapid building up of population in the Dominions must be based on the expansion of secondary and other industries, representing some reasonable approach to a balanced economy. At present progress on these lines is opposed persistently by a considerable part of the business and industrial organisation of the Mother Country. What is needed to solve the population problems of the Empire is almost a reversal of the present outlook of the directing brains of Britain’s existing economic organisation. The interests of the whole nation, and indeed those of humanity at a larger view, demand that the technical knowledge and experience of British industrialists should be made freely available in support of an enterprising development of industry in the Dominions, instead of being marshalled in active or deadweight opposition to that development. Given the right lead, the British nation is still perfectly capable of such efforts in the development, of its vast family estate as would speedily demonstrate to the world that the Empire is at the beginning, rather than nearing the end of its career.