Le Nord : revue internationale des Pays de Nord - 01.06.1941, Page 129

ECONOMIC ADAPTATION
I23
on the land. They must have spent at least a year in the country
doing work of the kind the company can offer them before
they can enter into the intended leasehold contract with the
company, which in the course of a number of years should be
converted into freehold tenure. The settler must be supplied with
a habitable house of the type commonly used where the land
is situated. There must be supplies of tools, the essential house-
hold articles and the most necessary domestic animals, which
he must gradually pay for by instalments. ¥e cannot enter into
details here and, as already suggested, we are prepared to re-
place this sketch by better proposals, provided they are supplied
by men who have experience of overseas conditions and coloni-
sation.
The other point on which people who have experience of
emigration hold divergent views is whether settlements should
be by groups or by individuals. We believe that colonisation
by groups is the right method, but not as it was done in Vene-
zuela where the houses, so to speak, were glued together so that
it must have been difficult for the individual family to have
a life of its own, which as we all know is as necessary for the
individual as for the family. By colonisation by groups we mean
settlement in the same district so that the settlers may without
greater difficulty communicate with one another when they wish.
We are of opinion that this question, subordinate as it may seem
to many, is of great importance, especially to the women among
the emigrants, whose contribution to the welfare of the family
is far greater in the case of emigration than at home. Isolation
is a far greater hardship for the women emigrants than for the
men whose work sometimes brings them into contact with others,
and the author has known capable women who have been on
the point of giving up — not on account of the work or the
strange conditions, but owing to the isolation. In one, but for-
tunately only one case the author has seen this depression develop
into a mental disease which would have been fatal had not the
woman been sent home with the result that she was completely
cured.
In this connection a general danger which apparently lurks
in every society of colonists should be mentioned. It is not too
much to say that any such society is joined by types which also
exist at home but which in a denser population and under a more
effective legal system cannot bring about so much destruction