REFUGEES : LIABILITY OR ASSET ?
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—The trouble with the refugees is that they have not yet been disciplined to decay peacefully as have our own un- employed. Most of them are afflicted with the itch to work (cacoethes laborandi), and this expresses itself in attempts to add to the supply of goods and services with which the world is already overburdened. I once saw one of these miscreants haled before the Bench. He had been caught red-handed polishing a wardrobe, and, but for the grace of God and the vigilance of the Home Office, he would have continued in his nefarious work of hastening the day when saturation point was reached in the furniture market and the whole industry would collapse overnight. He would almost certainly have married and settled down, started to pay rates and taxes, and probably had the effrontery to send his children to secondary schools. He was sent up for six months, and it struck me at the time that this would be a worse than futile proceeding. The fellow had all the marks of a recidivist : even his hands were calloused. In prison he would meet other old lags and discuss with them the various dodges for obtaining employment, and I am given to understand that some prison governors, to save themselves the trouble of inculcating a proper sense of leisure, surreptitiously set prisoners to work. I wager that somewhere in the world at the present time our man is busily fashioning timber into marketable form.
Is not this a case where we can legitimately call in the aid of medical science? Is there no gland which can be removed or atrophied so as to eliminate the original curse which induces sweating at the brow? Pending such a solution we must take every precaution against the sort of person who makes two blades of grass grow where one grew before, and the refugee must realise that he is being kept off the market for his own and the general good. Credat Judaeus Apella and let him starve with Christian fortitude.—Yours, &c.,
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