war; but unless that is taken into account no general statement of the question as it now stands can be adequate.

During the forty years before the war there was a steady exodus of population from the United Kingdom, a large and increasing proportion of which found its way to the Dominions. This exodus grew larger after 1899, when Canada had begun her immigration policy; it fell again in 1908, when the American crisis checked the development of the West, but it was still larger in that year of depression than in an average year a decade before; and from that time onwards it increased very rapidly, owing to Australia as well as Canada encouraging immigration. The outward stream of population reached its maximum in 1912, but there was no perceptible decline in its volume until the outbreak of war.

But despite this growth of emigration, which in Scotland and in parts of rural England excited some natural alarm when it was found that the population of certain districts was actually declining, the increased emigration by no means checked the general increase of population in the United Kingdom. Although the bulk of emigrants were young men in the prime of life, and either married or of marriageable age, and although this movement reached its height in the decennial period 1901-11, the total increase of population during that period was greater than at any previous time in our history. Taken as a whole, emigration during the last forty years has absorbed only 27 per cent. of the natural increase of the male population, and less than 22 per cent. of the increase of the female population: figures which should effectually silence those who complain that emigration is gradually depopulating these islands.

During the war this wave of emigration was first checked, then suspended, and finally the tide turned the other way; but it is clear that the check is only a temporary one. The toll which death has taken of our people in battle has indeed been heavy, and it has necessarily increased since we took the offensive against the enemy. But in spite of that distressing sacrifice, and a slight increase in the normal death-rate of adult civilians, there is every indication that the population of the British Isles will be larger at the conclusion of peace than at the outbreak of war. If therefore the abnormal circumstances which we had come to look upon as normal in

the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were exactly restored—I mean an expanding industrial and a diminishing agricultural population-we could not look for any diminution in their constant accompaniment, an emigration that declines indeed in good times and increases in bad, but which in the most prosperous periods carries off only some thousands and in times of bad trade some hundreds of thousands a year. But normal circumstances will not return. We have made up for the drain of war on our adult manhood by employing female labour and juvenile or adolescent male labour on a large scale. The former has been generally satisfactory and seldom overpaid, the latter-if we may judge by the testimony of employers and the police courts-generally unsatisfactory and overpaid. The tendency of employers will therefore be to refuse peremptorily, as soon as they can, to pay inefficient boys of seventeen a man's wages, but to continue to employ women in cases where they have done their work properly. And this extension of female labour into new trades will be in many ways to the national advantage. It will add to the producing power of the country, it will increase many household budgets, and it will give a very large number of idle women an occupation and an independence which they have hitherto lacked. Many women indeed who took up work for patriotic reasons will continue to work for personal reasons, because they like it, or at least because they like the money which it brings; and where employers and employed are at one in a matter of this kind the path is plain. As compared with the actual war period there will be a large exodus of women from industry when demobilisation brings men back to civil life, but as compared with the pre-war period there will certainly be a large increase of women in industry.

A considerable number of men who are now in the Army are assured of their situations when they return to civil life; most large employers of labour have acted in this way towards their staff. A number too will step naturally and easily into the first job that comes along. But it is clear that this will by no means account for every returned soldier. A few whose situations were guaranteed to them on their return will find that their firms have disappeared in the interval, by one of the ordinary casualties of commercial warfare; more perhaps will find a changed management, uncongenial conditions,

and prospects of promotion less bright than before. Some definitely cut the painter when they enlisted there were unpatriotic firms that kept men back and dismissed those who did their duty-and others had no definite employment when they joined and have no settled prospects when they leave the Army. There are also undoubtedly large numbers of men who have been thoroughly unsettled by active service, and who do not desire to return to their previous sedentary or monotonous employment, even though it be permanent and well paid. If wages fall, as they are likely to in some trades, the impulse to emigrate may well become still greater. Even if no account were taken of altered social conditions at home-alterations which must be profound and may possibly become permanent-the mental unsettlement and physical excitement engendered by the conflict would alone be sufficient to produce the unrest which in these islands always takes the form of an exodus. We must therefore facilitate emigration for those who wish to emigrate, in order to see that the men who are lost to England are not lost to the Empire.

After the Napoleonic Wars it is known that more than half of those who crossed the Atlantic went directly to the United States; and of those who went to Canada about half also crossed the international frontier a few years later. Again, of the quarter of a million men who left Great Britain in the year following the Boer War, about half went to the United States. Now we do not want to people the United States with Englishmen while Canada is invaded by Americans. But the only way to prevent these things is to foresee the problem, and to prepare the remedy in advance. Those who oppose emigration as a policy will not succeed in stopping it as a practice; they will at most succeed in ensuring that the British Empire loses some of the emigrants.

It does not seem to be everywhere understood that those who are discussing the whole question of organised emigration and systematic colonisation do so, not with the intention of urging men to go who do not want to go, but with the intention of seeing that the right men go, and that they have a place to go to. That is the modern attitude towards emigration, and it is admittedly a changed attitude. In the past we deported our failures and left our successes to look after themselves, with the singular result that the State populated

some British territories with convicts, while private enterprise took the sound Scottish ancestors of General Mackensen to Prussia. There came a time when the colonies protested vigorously against the Home Government's obstinate belief that cargoes of criminals and prostitutes were the proper foundation for an Imperial policy, and of late years they have rather turned the tables on us. Their lecturers have toured our countryside with photographs and pamphlets, urging Hodge to stretch out his hand for the fortune awaiting him in the Far West or the Antipodes, and their seductive propaganda has drawn considerably on our strong rural stocks. We cannot in fairness complain; we sent them what we wanted to be rid of, they retorted by bidding for what they wanted. Nobody who has looked into the past history of the Empire can have failed to notice that unsuitable emigrants have often been sent out, sometimes with unhappy and even disastrous consequences, merely in order to be quit of them; nobody who is familiar with the present colonial attitude towards the newcomer, particularly the newcomer on a large scale, can have failed to notice the demand that the colony and not the mother country shall decide who shall or shall not come. The reason is obvious, the stipulation just. Precisely as unsettlement at home leads to settlement overseas, so the emigrant here becomes the immigrant in the colonies. For us the problem is ended when the vessel sails; for them it is only beginning.

This inevitable divergence of aim can only be overcome, as the Dominions Royal Commission agrees, by co-operation. It does not however in the least follow that it is wise to set up a Central Emigration Authority with 'power reserved to it to 'limit, or prohibit the emigration of men, particularly men of military age, from the United Kingdom, except to destinations 'approved by the authority.' A board of this kind, which is suggested but not definitely recommended by the Commission, smacks rather of Prussia than of England, and even in Prussia, where the Government has definitely objected to emigration for many years, similar restrictions have not been altogether successful. Any attempt to enforce such a system in this country, except in the event of a very definite national peril after the war, would certainly lead to widespread opposition and evasion. Incidentally the Commissioners, in their zeal

for regulation and restriction, seem to have forgotten that Magna Carta-in its forty-second chapter-provides that It shall be lawful in future for anyone (excepting always 'those imprisoned or outlawed in accordance with the law of 'the kingdom, and natives of any country at war with us) to 'leave our kingdom and to return, safe and secure by land and 'water, except for a short period in time of war, on grounds of 'public policy, reserving always the allegiance due to us.' An Emigration Authority which endeavoured to prohibit emigration might find that Englishmen still preferred their ancient liberties to modern bureaucracy.

Fortunately there is no sign that this is the sole, or even the main object aimed at in the Committee recently set up by the Colonial Office in conjunction with the Agents-General of the Dominions to report on the measures to be taken for 'settling within the Empire ex-soldiers who may desire to 'emigrate after the war,' although it is true that the terms of reference mention the 'constitution of a central authority 'to supervise and assist emigration.' This committee wisely includes not only representatives of the Colonial States, but also the Emigration Commissioner of the Salvation Army. There are, however, several other private or semi-private emigration organisations in existence, ranging from the philanthropic society at one end of the scale to the commercial company which makes its profit out of transport or the sale of land at the other, and many of these bodies have a right to be consulted. Some-by no means all-are quite excellent; they have an organisation already in existence, a fund of accumulated experience, and they are adapted for a particular class of work which no other body could accomplish quite so successfully. It would be a mistake to ignore or override their efforts; and centralisation, the one and only remedy of the official mind, would deprive these associations of their individuality and consequently of their driving power. What is needed is to secure that they do not overlap; to crush them out in order to secure the whole ground for an official enterprise that is not yet formulated would be a grave blunder.

In these days when the fashion is all for State action, and private enterprise is at a discount, it is wise to remember that the British Empire owes far more to private enterprise than State action. The State discouraged free settlement in Australia, and