Emigration experts are for ever insisting that the Dominions only
require farmers and agriculturists, and that it is no use for the town-bred to seek a new home across the seas. It is therefore interesting to learn from an interview in the Times with Major E. A. Belcher, the assistant-manager of the British Empire Exhibition, who has just returned from a ten months' tour of the Dominions, that in his opinion "previous agricultural experience is not essential to a prospective migrant." "I hope this fetish will disappear," he states. In con- nexion with remarks which appeared on this page in the Spectator some weeks since, when the case of a Cockney who won a grain-growing contest in Western Canada was referred to, Major Belcher tells us that the best settler he saw in the Queensland cotton fields was a Glasgow carpenter, and the most successful of the new orchard settlers he came across in Tasmania was a London bank clerk. Everyone acquainted with the Dominions could, of course, give many similar instances ; at the same time, in the ranks of the unemployed in the larger cities in Canada and Australia there must be many British town-bred immigrants who would have had a much better chance of employment if they had had some previous agricultural training.
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