Aboard the P. & O.'s newest luxury liner Canberra, when she sailed from Southampton one afternoon last week, were 1,700 Britons who had paid only $28 each for the 21-day, 12,000-mile voyage to Australia. If the tourist-class passengers were getting a bargain, they represented an even greater boon for population-hungry Australia, which still likes to boast that it is "more purely British than Britain" and has spent $128 million since 1945 to lure close to a million emigrants from the mother country.
Historically, as "assisted" emigrants, the Canberra's passengers were only following in the wake of the first shipload of British...