New Zealand and Asiatic Migration.

The character of migrations is essentially determined by the costs of movement. A comparative study of the history of migrations in different parts of the world shows a clear gradation of types according to the magnitude of the obstacles that have to he overcome. Under such perfect market conditions clearly no unemployment in any serious sense of the term can arise. It is true that the population estimates for 1929 and 1930 show that the numbers responded somewhat slowly to the Great Depression; however, it might be remembered that this devastating calamity caught people unawares who could claim vastly, greater foresight than illiterate Indian peasants, and not many markets resumed their activity as smoothly and speedily as this one. Today there is no longer a free market for Indian labor in Burma. The system described was dependent in its working on the firm resolution of the political power to tolerate no barriers to enterprise and trade within the area under its control. In the arguments of even moderate Burmese nationalists it mattered little that economically the linkage with India had proved to be an outstanding success, that, in fact, it had created modern Burma.