My right hon. Friend the Member for Derby (Mr. Thomas) confined his remarks almost exclusively to what we may call the Dominion aspect of this great problem. I propose to devote myself rather to the Crown Colony and Protectorate side of it. I will, however, make one short exception in regard to the question of migration. I agree that if it is right that people should be migrated from one part of the Empire to another the progress is disappointingly slow, but I have never aroused in myself tremendous enthusiasm for the migration of other people, and I feel the very utmost we can do is to say that those who desire to go should have facilities provided for them. There should be no delays placed in their way, but there should be no cumbrous machinery to move them. In my judgment, many hon. Members, in estimating who are the kind of people to go, speak with only half knowledge of what is required. As one whose parents were both agricultural labourers and who himself was an agricultural labourer from early boyhood to early manhood, I detect an unreality about a great deal of the advice that is given. It is not a question as to whether a townsman is fit or unfit, or a countryman is fit or unfit. The real problem is whether the man's soul, his spirit, has been divorced from Nature or contact with country life, and so on. If it has, it does not matter whether he is a townsman or a countryman, he will fail. If it has not, it does not matter whether he was born in a city or in the country, he will succeed. So the question is, not that farm labouring work is not hard work—some of it is desperately hard work—but the real point is whether the man has the knack of using tools and whether he has been prepared by training for the work that is put before him.

With that short exception, I should like to confine what I have to say to the question of the Crown Colonies and Protectorates. I would express, first of all, my very great disappointment that the report of the Under-Secretary for the Colonies on his visit to West Africa is not available for us. It would have been immensely interesting and I much regret that there has been so much delay in producing it. I should like to ask him certain questions in regard to it if only to provoke him into giving us some information. I should like to ask him first of all when an opportunity will be provided for it to be discussed in the House—whether in this part of the Session or in the Autumn Session. Secondly I should like him to tell us something about the social conditions prevailing in the territories that he visited, the economic conditions, the condition of the workers, whether they are prosperous, in regard to earnings, how they are housed and what the provisions are for their education and general well being. I should like him to tell us something about the system of production in which they are engaged and any other special problem that came before his notice, but especially I should like to ask him something about 'the problem centring round the production of palm oil products.

How does that problem stand in West Africa at present? We should like to have information whether it is produced upon what we generally call the West African system or is the plantation system superseding that, and if so, with what results I have no close knowledge of this industry, but I believe prior to 1914 the native could collect and sell freely this product to anyone who wished to buy it, whether it was a member of our own or any other nation, and that he had in actuality a complete monopoly of that trade inasmuch as the particular palm which will produce this fruit will only grow in that one place in the world. In British West Africa alone there were collected 350,000 tons, or £6,000,000 worth of this product. In 1916 a Committee was set up presided over by the right hon. Gentleman who is now Minister of Labour, and it was recommended that a differential duty of not less than £2 per ton should be placed upon this commodity. It was not a War-time measure because it was never put into operation during that period, but in 1919 the Colonial Office urged the. local Government to put the order into operation. They did so and it failed. It shows, in my judgment, that the very greatest care should be taken before we begin to play with preferential tariffs and preferences of any kind, for the result of the putting into operation of this order was that Holland, which had not previously produced this material, caught the idea of trying whether it could be produced in Sumatra. They tried, and the success has been not only extraordinary but has become something of a menace to our own industry.