refused to take any action in colonising New Zealand; private enterprise, after fighting the Colonial Office, founded Victoria and South Australia, and Wellington, Dunedin, and Canterbury in New Zealand. Private enterprise has given Canada. more than one transcontinental railway; State action has not yet completed the first Australian transcontinental line. Had an Emigration Authority with powers to prohibit emigration been in existence in 1583, when the first definite attempts were made to plant English colonies, there might indeed have been a British Empire, but it would have been very different from the one that grew out of voluntary effort. James I. opposed the Virginia Company, and Charles I. the Puritan emigration which led to the foundation of New England; both would certainly have used the Central Emigration Authority to defeat those schemes. Two hundred years later the British Government held that Australia was an unsuitable country for free settlers, and did its best to reserve that continent to those who had the privilege of entry by way of the Old Bailey. A Central Emigration Authority with power to prohibit emigration was in fact in existence, so far as the Antipodes were concerned, in those days, but it broke down before the efforts of private citizens, conspicuous among whom were Macarthur and Gibbon Wakefield. Had such an authority been continuously in existence, we should certainly have had the transportation settlements at Barbados under Cromwell and at Botany Bay under George III., but our annals would have been innocent of the Pilgrim Fathers; nor would they have been inscribed with the deeds of the Anzacs, the descendants of the free settlers who went to Australia and New Zealand when the transportation system broke down.

There is indeed room for several forms of colonial enterprise, so long as they do not get in each other's way and all conform to the elementary rule that they pick the right men for the work and put them in the right place. It does not seem antecedently probable that a Central Emigration Authority, to be constituted after the war and necessarily new to its work, will succeed better than organisations such as the Australian States, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Dr. Barnardo's Homes, which have already a wide experience and personal knowledge of the problem. Doubtless there is

room for, and some need of, an advisory board which shall correlate the work of the various emigration societies and secure that each works to the best advantage; but there is no demonstrable need for an official organisation with power to override the work of every existing association and, if it pleases, prohibit their activities altogether in order to centralise the whole machinery of emigration in Whitehall. If all emigrants to the British Dominions are compelled to pass through an official sieve which accepts or rejects them at pleasure, then some of the most active and enterprising men who object to the delays and formalities inevitable under a system of bureaucratic control will go to the United States, and the very policy which we are attempting to forward will be defeated.

The Commission next discusses in some detail the difficult and delicate question of female emigration. It is common ground that we want to emigrate families rather than single men, and there are few cases indeed in which the married man should not have the preference over the bachelor. To do otherwise simply accentuates the social difficulty at both ends: it increases the already grave excess of women over men at home-an excess which the war has unhappily emphasised; it also re-establishes the excess of men over women in the colonies, which was in process of elimination.

There remains the problem of the emigration of single women. The Commission recognises that these should be encouraged to settle in the Dominions, so long as they can be persuaded to settle in the rural rather than in the already over-crowded urban centres; and it advises that women, who should be drawn from a larger class than that which is accustomed to engage in domestic service, should be given some simple training for this career, remarking that such training can be given better in the Dominions than at home. Unfortunately the report does not deal with the initial difficulty of selecting suitable women for this work. It is to be regretted that in treating this branch of the subject the Commissioners' work is less adequate and original than in dealing with the emigration of men and children from the United Kingdom to the Dominions. The vagueness of their recommendations, and the fact that they fall back on the women's emigration societies which already exist instead of recommending that the Central Emigration

Authority should deal with female as with male emigration, prove either that the Commissioners have not much faith in their proposed Central Authority or that they are afraid to grasp the difficult problems of female emigration.

The machinery therefore which will deal with emigrants from this country after the war remains uncertain: it may consist either of the individual associations which have done such good work in the past, or of a brand-new authority which will occupy one of the few remaining London hotels with officials or turn the Athenaeum Club into an Emigration Bureau. But as regards the location of intending settlers, something more definite has been accomplished, albeit through nonofficial channels. The final word, of course, rests with the various Colonial States concerned.

The information collected by Sir Rider Haggard in his mission of inquiry round the Empire last year shows in which colonies men are wanted, and also shows how far the work of preparing for immigrants has progressed. The full details of his investigation must be read in his report to the Royal Colonial Institute; but, broadly speaking, the results are as follows.

In the Commonwealth, Tasmania will provide land for three hundred British soldiers, or for a very much larger number if financial arrangements can be made by the British Government. Victoria will give British soldiers the same advantages as Victorian service men. Queensland will set aside a million acres for ex-service men from the British Isles to be selected by the Queensland Government, providing the necessary funds can be raised. New South Wales, which also insists on the right of selection, contemplates providing for at least a thousand British settlers. West Australia, while so far without any definite scheme, will give the same conditions to United Kingdom men as to West Australians. South Australia will do the same. New Zealand, whose available land is more limited, will give preference to British soldiers and sailors and their families over other immigrants, ranking them immediately after the Dominion's own returned service men.

In Canada, where the question of land grants devolves partly on the Dominion, partly on the provinces, and to some extent on the great railway corporations, no general summary can be attempted, but it was generally agreed that the Dominion requires men, that the various authorities should

plan their schemes in concert-the first steps to this end were taken in January last in a conference with Sir Robert Borden at Ottawa-and that they would welcome British ex-service men, provided they have the right of choosing suitable immigrants. The Canadian Pacific Railway, which has the most definite scheme of settlement, insists that the soldier selected should be a married man with previous agricultural knowledge, this last provision being one which past experience has rendered very necessary.

In the Union of South Africa the Government will not undertake any immigration or settlement policy, and what is done must be done by private enterprise. In practice, only settlers with private capital will find any opening. The Chartered Company, on the other hand, has offered half a million acres free to approved soldier settlers, and will provide expert advice and supervision for these men ; but the location of the grant has not been defined, nor the terms-size of farms, whether irrigated or not, etc.-on which it will be available.

It is clear therefore that there are large areas of land available for settlement, and that whilst the Governments of the territories concerned insist on choosing their settlers, the settlers also have a choice of territories. There remains the question of financing this movement; but the cost, when divided among the various parties to the transaction, is so small compared with the colossal figures of current war expenditure, that one almost feels it necessary to apologise for dwelling on a trivial matter of at most a few million pounds. Most of the emigrants will not be monied men, and one may take it that they will retain their own small personal resources for personal needs and sudden emergencies. Somebody must advance money to cover the cost of passage, the cost of any cultivation, irrigation, or other advance preparation which the land allotted to the immigrant has undergone, also the cost of any buildings erected or implements supplied, and the cost of seed or stock provided. Such advances, with interest added, ought to be repaid by annual instalments in from five to fifteen years, or whatever other terms in exceptional cases were found to be equitable. In calculating the rate of repayment one wants to avoid, on the one hand, too heavy a tax on the early and leaner years, and, on the other hand, the danger of allowing the transaction to drag on for

a lifetime. With reasonably good settlers on a reasonably good soil, the whole debt ought to be cleared off in twenty years.

By whom shall the money be advanced? In some cases no doubt satisfactory arrangements will be made by the associations already referred to, and by private companies formed for the specific purpose of land settlement, of the type which has been so successful in the past. But the bulk of the work in the present condition of the Empire must be done by the self-governing States and provinces of the great Dominions, and they will undertake the direct financial responsibility of the settlement (with the United Kingdom as guarantor in the background), and that for two reasons. The colony cannot have full freedom to choose its men unless it takes the responsibility of financing them; he who pays the piper calls the tune. And when the emigrant becomes the settler repaying his debt, it is the colony in which he has settled that is concerned with him; the Queensland Government can deal with a man in Queensland, but the British Government cannot.

Let us put the cost of establishing each settler at £200, and reckon that any number between fifty thousand-a figure that is certainly too low-and five hundred thousand men -a figure possibly too high-will wish to emigrate after the war. Then a minimum of ten and a maximum of a hundred millions sterling would be needed for this purpose-a sum which represents the cost of the war from two days to three weeks. But this colonisation loan would differ from most other loans in the fact that in the second or third year the capital would begin to be redeemed, and by the twentieth year at the outside it should be wholly paid off. Can it be contended this is an excessive amount to spend on a policy which would strengthen the whole British Empire by reducing the pressure on its heart and carrying blood to its extremities? Let those who doubt study the intolerable hardships and the heavy burden of poor relief after the Napoleonic Wars.

It is clear from Sir Rider Haggard's report that the number of men whom the various colonial States can absorb depends in many, and probably in most, cases on financial arrangements being made for that purpose. In addition to the renewed demand for capital for development purposes which drove up the rate of interest for some years before 1914