PHOCION, A NEGLECTED HERO. By The Hon. Gilbert Coleridge THE AFTERMATH OF IGNORANCE. By Major-Gen. Sir George Aston COMPETITION AND WAR. By Arthur Caspersz FRANCE, ENGLAND AND THE RUHR SOME PLAIN TRUTHS. F. J. P. Veale OUR AGRICULTURE: Hammond Foot SOME ENGLISH LETTER-WRITERS. By EARLY DAYS ON THE AISNE. By Captain H. M. B. Salmon THE CULT OF PESSIMISM. By Captain E. C. Cox HORRORS IN PEACE-TIME-AND THEIR COMMERCIAL EXPLOITERS (1) SOME ANTI-MILITARIST FALLACIES. By G. R. Stirling Taylor (1) ARGUMENTS AGAINST IT. By Captain C. E. Loseby (2) ARGUMENTS FOR IT. By Cyril Falls. WHY DO WE REMAIN IN MESOPOTAMIA? By Sir George Buchanan THE KENYA CONFERENCE. By Brig.-Gen. F. G. Stone. INTERNATIONAL MANNERS. By W. Alison Phillips Three EveningS WITH COUNT LEO TOLSTOÏ. By S. N. Everling...786, 841 CAN we look with indifference upon the ravages that the war has made upon our trade? Can we watch undisturbed and see our great Midland towns-Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and Sheffield, etc. die from inertia? It was past European prosperity that increased the population of these towns. How are they now to exist when the bottom has dropped out of our industries? The world is no longer the old world of 1914. This great upheaval has broken up the old trade routes; antagonism and self-sufficiency have arisen where formerly interdependence and mutual help were the ruling forces. Our trade has been seriously jeopardised and damaged in all four corners of the world by a new spirit-a spirit of merciless VOL. XCIII-No. 551 I B revenge and greed, born of the unhallowed and unworkable Treaty of Peace in the Council Chamber of Versailles. The working classes of this country are to-day in a most unhappy position. The greater number of workers are stagnating in congested towns, with small chance of making a bare living, and are absolutely dependent on the uncertainties of commercial prosperity for their daily bread. The vital question for Great Britain to-day is this: Can we expect a full revival of trade in the near future and hope to give full employment to the people through the medium of international trade? If you were to ask for an honest reply from the industrial world it would be an emphatic 'No.' Its leaders would tell you that the trade of the country has gone through a radical change. Where their travellers formerly found wealth and opportunity they now find a debased currency and insolvency. Where they found interdependency they now find self-sufficiency and hostility. Under these terrible conditions, what are the workers to do? Their very existence is dependent on the healthy beat of our industries. Are they to sink into destitution and waste away under the pauperising dole? Are they to suffer in perpetuity because of the blunders of past and present statesmen and the callous apathy of our politicians? The misery bred from the uncertainty of our dark and lowering future is rising to heaven in a dumb appeal from every great city throughout the country. We have a population of forty-five millions, of whom we can only feed fifteen millions from home produce. This leaves thirty millions artificially fed on imported produce, which costs us annually 700,000,000l. a year. This great burden of import is of our own making, and comes from the large landowning agricultural system which has for many years been established in this country. It is a system which has from time immemorial been the most wasteful and pernicious in the world, and has always ended in bloodshed and anarchy. It is a system of crude farming with the minimum of labour. All the intensive methods of the small holding system, of utilising every yard of ground and developing to their utmost capacity the farmyard, poultry, piggeries, and garden produce, is eliminated on the big estates owing to the insufficiency of supervision and knowledge and the cost of labour. To illustrate this: there are big farmers in Lincolnshire who have neither cow, stock, nor vegetable gardens beyond the requirements of the internal economy of the farm, and during the war land girls that worked on these farms had to fall back upon condensed milk and preserved eggs. |