of expert workers to Britain, and the corresponding gain to foreign countries; but alarming instances may be gathered in Birmingham and Newcastle or from elsewhere. The comparative gain and loss may be compared with the results of the suicidal exile of the Huguenots, who transported their inherited skill from France to England from 1666 onwards. We shall never know how much of the 100,000,000l. by which the export trade of the United States has increased within twelve months, is due to transferred British brains. Canada suffers in this respect, more than England, at least in certain branches of activity. Her best men, notably in agricultural science, are drawn over the border, one after the other, by the attraction of money. Canadian and British losses in this respect are due to different causes, are not accurately comparable; except that in both cases this empire of ours is being deprived of its best without any compensation whatever. Great Britain is, therefore, in this doubly unpleasant plight—she is diminishing her tale of the workers who are best able to promote the reputation of her products, and she is discovering no cure for her plethora of population. It is the opinion of those best able to judge that the unemployment of a round million of would-be workers is permanent, so long as the population keeps its present level; whereas, of course, it is increasing rapidly. The loss of the skilled and the increase of the unskilled workman are aspects of the same problem.

The situation is not the result of incidental circumstances. It belongs to the march of our history. We are reaching, if not the last, at any rate a new stage of the industrial revolution. We decided at a particular date to accept the opportunity offered by our coal, our command of water transport and our James Watts. We determined to rely mainly on manufacture. We put most of our eggs in one basket; and we have continued with a logical consistency quite foreign to our character -or perhaps with an obstinacy that is less foreign-to pursue that original choice. Steadily for the last two generations and more we have multiplied our industrial population, enlarged the towns, emptied the villages, and diminished the product of our farms. Statistics of the facts at home, as well as the present condition of

ea

Denmark, Belgium, and Holland, and many larger countries, prove that if we chose we could increase produce and multiply rural workers by at least 100 per cent. Not fewer than ten thousand labourers have ei vanished from the fields within the memory of our oldage pensioners. We led at the start in this fierce race for wealth,' and maintained the lead without trouble; but it is certain now, to say no more, that whatever genius and energy we develop, we cannot hope to increase that lead. To-day, with a million and a half of unemployed-if we include the whole of those who vainly seek for work-we are employing as many persons as we employed before the war, in spite of competition, the loss of certain markets, the disorganisation of Europe, and improvements in labour-saving machinery, which almost amount to a revolution in themselves. In many trades, if we compare 1925 with 1914, one man can do five men's work, even ten men's work, and do it without the former strain. That is one of the direct results of the war, not enough heeded by social philosophers. It follows that we cannot hope to do more than maintain our lead and our number of workers, and the strongest of the reasons is that many new competitors have entered the race and are trained for it. The factories on the Continent, especially in France, have been improved out of recognition. Oil and water-power have given to almost every country the opportunity of the cheap power that created the prosperity of our Black Country. In Australia, which has neither water-power nor oil, immense deposits of first-rate coal are found close to the ironstone; and the Australian opportunity for industrial development is much the same as the British, bating the geographical position. The industrial power and wealth of the United States are tremendous- A thing imagination boggles at.' Natural resources, technical equipment, energy, all are there in abundance. That we can hold our own, we hope and believe. We certainly can do so if we are not handicapped by too heavy a weight, but the burden of unemployment is immense and the growth of population continuous. This can only mean that our handicap will be progressive. The unlikelihood of our obtaining a much greater trade is accompanied by the certainty of our having more mouths

to feed, more hands to employ. In short, we are faced by the prospect of a growing mass of unemployed, whatever may be the oscillations of trade. This means national poverty and misery. The country will become too full of people; and the result will be what it is in those other spheres of lesser biology, from which Malthus first drew his argument, accepting the lesson learnt from insects for the advantage of men.

The nature of the remedies is as plain as the malady is obvious. There are two methods of treatment which may be used simultaneously with the best effect. One is to redress within our own country one disastrous result of the concentration on the product of factories for export. We cannot go back on the industrial revolution; and we do not wish to. We must continue to stress our industries, but there is no sort of reason why that development should be associated with neglect of the land. Intensive agriculture on a co-operative basis should be the natural corollary to the great co-operative purchasing organisations of the northern towns. countryman should sell the primary products that the townsman needs. That is the remedy. The other is the better distribution of the population.

The

Five years ago in New South Wales a scheme was outlined and much bruited abroad under the name of the Million Farms. In regard to some of its details, the less said of the plan the better; but at worst it suggested a definite progressive policy, which if feasible would be of general benefit, to Australia, to the Empire, and to the rest of the world, by increasing the output of primary products. Great Britain might wisely borrow this round figure from Sir John Carruthers, the begetter of the New South Wales cry. A million farms added to the farms of the whole Empire, on each of which one inhabitant of Great Britain was placed, would solve most of our troubles at home and greatly add to the wealth and prosperity of the dominions. All of us who have lived in rural England, and cultivated any intimacy of acquaintance with its social and economic changes, know that a good farming year is at once reflected in the increased prosperity of the county towns. Correspondingly, every new man who extracts a living from the land, in almost any part of the Empire, adds

momentum to the trade of the Empire. A million farms in New South Wales, if they were established, would produce an almost instantaneous effect on the export 115! trade, say, of Birmingham.

Let that aspect of the resettlement of population I be set aside for the moment. The first intention, from our narrower, more insular point of view, is to provide homes and work for the workless, for that part of our population which may strictly be called superfluous, though objections have been raised to the adjective. It is not in the stream of our life. It does harm, not good. It swamps the country without fertilising it. It becomes stagnant, a centre of distress and a cause of it. For the sake of the British Isles it would not much matter where the farms were situated. They would serve the same vital purpose whether they were in 1 Wiltshire or Huntingdonshire, where villages are now vanishing and the land is going out of cultivation, or in British Columbia, where untold square miles of country are covered with timber of which no economic use is made, or in Queensland, where some of the finest pastoral land in the world lies over an ideal artesian system, or on small fruit areas, such as those irrigated and provided with homesteads along the borders of Victoria and New South Wales-holdings not at all unlike the much-advertised citron orchards of South Africa. A steadily progressive policy of cotton-growing—which is an ideal small-holder's business-is being promoted in several parts of the Empire, especially in the Sudan and Queensland, and in due course, if it survive another fifty years, the Empire should be self-sufficient. There is room, doubtless, for another fifty million of inhabitants in Canada and Australia alone; and whatever local objections may be raised, it remains that every AgentGeneral or High Commissioner is a zealot in the cause of Empire settlement. They are often, doubtless, at cross. purposes with the labour leaders, and yet more with the extreme wing of Australian Labour, but even the Premier of Queensland has recently confessed publicly that if Australia cannot populate her island-continent, she does not deserve to own it.

Is the aim of a million farms or holdings within the Empire a fantastic idea? Mr James A. Williamson,

in his Europe Overseas,' makes the following suggestion:

'In the last generation these food-producing and raw material producing countries have begun to create a local balance between agriculture and industry which will render them less dependent upon trade with distant regions of the world. . . . When this comes about what will be the position of the people of countries like Great Britain, unable to live by their own food-stuffs and raw material? Will not they be driven to a colonisation, much more rapid and intensified than ever before, of their home soil and of the great thinly peopled dominions? . . . The question then resolves itself into these terms: Are we at the opening of a period in which the concentrated population of Europe will seek to distribute itself more uniformly over all the habitable parts of the world, moving out over the oceans in masses such as have never moved before? And in considering it, we should remember that transport facilities are, and will be, greater than they have ever been before.'

It may be that this 'Great Trek' is beginning. Four years ago a large number of the states of the Dominions were busy organising schemes of immigration, and many observers expected to see a flow of emigration large enough to keep within bounds the population resident in this country. For various reasons, mostly political, the flow was suddenly arrested. There was delay in completing arrangements between our Government and the Governments of the Dominions. The Committee of Overseas Settlement, established to carry through the Empire Settlement Act, failed in some of the virtues essential to an executive and administrative branch. It was big and composed of several minds and tempers. At the same time some factious opposition overseas coincided with thoroughly sound and genuine objections raised by financial economists who were under obligation to balance the local budgets.

Some of the inhibitions have now been withdrawn. In the Prairie Provinces of Canada three thousand new farms are being equipped for British settlers; and with Australia the vital principle has been established that the Home Government is ready, under certain conditions, to spend money in what may be called establishment charges, in preparing the homestead for its emigrant. We may expect to see the resurgence of Sir James