POPULATION & PROSPERITY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 24 February 1939, Page 9

POPULATION & PROSPERITY

(To the Editor.) Sir,—l note that Mr Barnard, Speaker of the House of Representatives, is reported to have told an audience that the population of New Zealand is decreasing and therefore we must have a Ministry of Emigration and go ahead importing immigrants. If Mr Barnard were not one of our most trusted leading men, would it be worth while replying to such utter nonsense? Who has seen the census that substantiates the assertion that our population is decreasing? The figures published in the “Year Book” for 1938 tell us that in 1930 our population . was 1,478.000 and in 1937 that number had increased to 1.578,000—an increase of 100,000 at an average of about 14,000 a year. Is not that fact enough, seeing we have to spend millions every year on relief work? Moreover, there was no immigration and there was a falling birth-rate. Does that look as if the natural increase is insufficient for keeping up the population? What is there more ruinous to the prosperity of a nation than over-population? In about 60 years, from 1780 to 1875, Ireland trebled her population. In less than five years she lost nearly half her population by famine, pestilence and migration. How came that about? Overseas competition, due to free trade with England, shut up her factories. The consequent rush for the land raised the rents. The high rents reduced the standard of living to the level of potatoes and water. The failure of the potato crop finished the thing. So, all we have to do is to let cheap imported goods shut up our factories, leaving nothing but farming to go to. The high rents and unemployment, aided by immigration, will do the rest. It is only a question of time. And if the present agitation for more people succeeds, New Zealand will be the same hell on earth that Ireland became. —Yours, etc., HANS C. THOMSEN. Masterton, February 22.