to sell his homeless squadron to a South American republic. Then a change gradually set in. First of all Britain became dependent in a measure on foreign food-suppliespartly through neglect of agriculture and partly through the wonderful increase of population. It has grown more and more dependent ever since, until at last its local supply of provender has ceased to be worth consideration. At first it got its inward furnishment from the nations close at hand, and as the countries with surplus food to sell were many while the buyers were few, prices ranged very low and supplies seemed unlimited. In those days the policy of depending upon imported food looked like a wise policy, and the Free Trader projected his chest till it reached almost across the street and scoffed with a mighty scoff at all who were not of his way of thinking. But the situation developed very fast. The Netherlands, France, Germany, and other adjacent countries dropped, one by one, out of the ranks of the countries with surplus food to sellthose whose competition tended to make the loaf cheap-and joined those that wanted to buy food, and which tended, by the reverse variety of competition, to make food dear. It was only in 1903 that Germany ceased to figure as a big supplier of the Englishman's loaf, and Turkey only dropped out of the supplying industry about 1907. Roumania was once a very great wheat-seller, but it is now a very small one and promises soon to be no seller at all. The United States reached its highest figure in 1902, when it headed the list of the countries with surplus wheat to dispose of. In 1907 it sold to England over 43,000,000 cwt. of grain and nearly 16,000,000 cwt. of flour. That was a short nine years ago, and it is difficult to realize how many changes have befallen since then. The trouble is that the United States has a birth-rate just the same as England, also it has an immigration rate. Already the surplus wheat it has to sell to John Bull, the hungry person on the little crowded island in the North Sea, has dropped about seventy-five per cent. Apparently in another two or three years the United States will be using all its own grain-supply, and in two or three more years it will be an importer and be busy intercepting the surplus of Canada or Argentina, or both. For when a country turns, by reason of increase of population or other causes, from grain-seller to grainbuyer, the position is that of the politician who changes sides. He is only one politician but his change makes a difference of two votes. Already it may be that Canada has reached its limit as a purveyor of the British loaf, and is on the down grade. There is no certainty about this, but Canada's export of wheat to Britain in 1910 was certainly a little less than in 1909. Britain's main reliance for its staple victual is now on Russia, and a war with that country would cut off half its supply. Its other chief supporters are India, Canada, Argentina and Australasia, and as regards three of these there are terribly long lines of communication to be guarded in order to prevent the supply being intercepted. Canada is likely to be a failing source of supply, both through the increase of local population and the appearance, at an early date, of the United States as a buyer of Canadian wheat. Argentina has a population which is expanding in a remarkable fashion and a local demand which is naturally doing the same. As a result Argentina is already a failing granary, and the surplus which it sent to England in 1910 was only half that of 1908. The enormous increase of the population of India also makes that empire a precarious post to lean against. Thus in sixty or seventy years of Free Trade and magnificent birth-rate England has passed through three stages. First, it was a country which was capable, with reasonable care, of feeding itself. Second, it was a country which bought its food from a multitude of supplies close at hand. Third, it has become a country which has to rake the farthest extremities of the earth for its daily loaf, and which depends almost wholly on six distant lands for its food. Moreover, it depends for half its food on one foreign State towards which its policy, for the past sixty or seventy years, has been generally hostile. It is quite possible that, a few years hence, the German demand for Russian grain will have grown to such an extent that the Muscovite empire may feel that it can struggle along for a year or two without its British customer. By that time, probably, the United States and Argentina may be dropping out of the supply business. Then a war between Britain and Russia will be quite a new proposition. There will be no battles, no flags, no blare of trumpets; only a dogged sitting down on one side and a ruinously expensive loaf on the other. If the evidence counts for anything there is a good time coming for the agricultural races with food to sell. From the beginning of the world until a few years ago they appear to have been struggling in an overstocked market. Now it appears that a time is coming when the demand will exceed the supply and tend to get further and further ahead of the supply, so that the man who grows the loaf will fix the price. Yet good fortune is seldom unalloyed, and there is a prospective fly of great tonnage in the agriculturist's ointment. A large fertile country with a small population has always been a Naboth's vineyard to the nations whose people are many and their acres few. And not many years hence the desire to own the world's few fertile and compara tively empty spaces is likely to be intensified a hundred-fold. Therefore the people with surplus wheat will do well to arm themselves betimes, for they will be in just as much danger as the man who keeps the Koh-i-noor in a wooden box in an undefended house. The immediate future of the world will probably lie with the strong nation which contrives to get hold of the last great thinly peopled food-growing area and hold it against all comers. On the other hand there is every sign of a cold time for the nation which depends on imported food-supplies, and the coldest time is in view for the nation which is most dependent. On the dim horizon of events it is possible to foresee a day when Britain may be blockaded, not by fleets ranging the Channel and the Irish Sea and the German Ocean, but lying five thousand miles away and shutting up the food outlets. And beyond that, but not far beyond, is a time when the blockade may be effected without any ships at all, merely through one or two Governments prohibiting the export of grain. And further ahead, but per haps not much further ahead, is the time when the blockade will become chronic even in time of peace. If the present surplus of births over deaths lasts for another hundred years the few remaining countries with surplus food for sale will find the price of the local loaf being driven up sky-high by the competition of foreign buyers. Then there will arise that clamor of the hungry local populace, to which a Government must lend its ear unless it wishes to lose its head-or, what is almost more important, its situation and its salary. So there will naturally ensue export duties on wheat, which will be bad for the countries which depend in part on foreign food-supplies, and worse for those which depend almost wholly on foreign supplies. And as the trouble grows worse these export duties will be increased, till at last the day of total prohibition of food exports will come unobtrusively to pass, like a bagman arriving at a country hotel in the dead waste and middle of the night. Then, presumably, the hungriest nations will make war on the least hungry nations, and will demand the sale of the essential loaf at the cannon's mouth. And if the fleets of the least hungry nations are sunk their armies will make a desperate stand in front of the coveted loaf. And if the armies of the loaf-holding races are defeated they will burn the cornfields in their retreat, and fall back on the inland regions and trust to famine as their best ally. After that it is difficult to guess what may happen, but it is certain that an ironclad cannot climb a tree and that a fleet is of no service in a desert. Therefore, when it becomes a question, not of holding the seas so that friendly nations which want to send us wheat may not be hindered or disturbed, but of pursuing the wheat of unfriendly races even to the field and the barn, the situation will have to be viewed in a new light. Theoretically, no doubt, all this is absurd. Nothing of the kind ever happened before within human knowledge, therefore it is foolish to suggest that anything of the kind may happen. Against this it can only be advanced that everything happens for the first time one day or another. If it didn't it would never happen and in that case nothing would ever occur, and if nothing occurred there would be neither time nor space nor any other circumstance whatsoever. The world is not ruled by precedent; even death is a breach thereof, for everybody it kills has had a habit of being alive up till the last moment. The great trouble of this poor old globe is that it is facing a perfectly new set of events, and they have arrived too suddenly. Within the time of people still living it has done a whole multitude of things for which there is no previous parallel in all history; in fact, almost everything it has done has been unparalleled. Partly through increase of the birthrate, largely through diminution of the death-rate, and in some measure through folly and lack of foresight, the centre of the world's civilization is becoming almost wholly dependent on the forbearance of the circumference. It never before had to dredge its daily loaf from so far afield. It never before had so many competitors for the loaf, or saw a prospect of such a steady increase of competition. And it never before had to obtain the loaf from people who had such a great and steadily increasing demand for the article themselves, or from people so well qualified to fight for the goods if they should desire to retain them. Rome even in its decay could still serve short notice on unwarlike Egypt to send along the wheat ships whether Egypt desired to part with them or not, and the matter of payment hardly entered into consideration. The present great wheatsupplying countries are of different calibre in a military sense. The last century has been a time of riot in many ways. During that period the world has dug up and used more of its irreplaceable capital in the shape of coal and metals, and cut down more of its accumulated capital in the shape of forests, than it did so far as we are able to ascertain-in all the preceding ages since Creation. There are old men still living who can remember when coal-mining practically began in England, for the output in 1820 only amounted to 12,500,000 tons. Yet al- . ready the duration of the British coalsupply is calculated by learned pessimists as two or three centuries, on the basis of the present consumption. the demand increases at the rate of recent times-it has multiplied twentyone fold in ninety years and is now If about 265,000,000 tons per annum-half a century may see the end. There are men not long dead who could remember what was practically the beginning of the British iron industry, for in the year 1800 the British Isles only dug out enough ore to make 190,000 tons of pig iron, and in 1740 they only dug out enough to make 20,000 tons. The figure is now nearly 10,000,000 tons per annum, and there is reason to conjecture that in a single year the country uses up more of this ancient capital than it did between the time of Cain and the accession of the House of Hanover. Iron and coal, and new continents on which to settle surplus population, are not created now, for that vast tempestuous female called Earth has relapsed into placid middle age. So it becomes a matter of inquiry how long the accumulated resources of the countries with small areas and big birth-rates can stand the strain. As for timber, it has been cut down wholesale to make room for that population which, according to the birthrate fanatics, is never large enough, however large it may be. The ends of the earth have now to be searched for timber to make the British table on which to put the British loaf, which also comes from the ends of the earth. And the supply grows more and more limited. The United States used to be one of the world's great timber furnishers; it was so within the memory of men who have not yet sunk into senile decay and started to advertise themselves as the Oldest Inhabitants. Now the United States imports trees and mashes them up to make paper on . which to print its yellow journal, and it is confronted by a scarcity that is growing at an unreasonable rate. is a question whether the countries with a timber surplus or those with a wheat surplus will be the first to prohibit exports. In other words, it is a question whether the countries which It depend on imports will find themselves first with a table and no loaf to put on it or with a loaf which they will have to deposit on the floor. There are still many thinly peopled and only partially developed regions which contain great possibilities as growers of food for the nations which have eaten up their substance in a century of haste and riot. Unfortunately for the nations of haste and riot these possibilities already grow visibly less. The European has invaded the undeveloped countries with his doctrine of the huge birth-rate. He has suppressed to the best of his ability slave-hunting, tribal wars, massacres, and human sacrifices. He has introduced drains and hygiene and serum and collection plates. He has toiled hard to extinguish local diseases, and when he reckoned that he had found a remedy for the sleeping sickness and saw before him a prospect of making 10,000,000 or 100,000,000 Africans grow very shortly where none grew before, he was a proud and inflated philanthropist. If by the time he has taught his colored brother of the African highlands to be a great wheat-grower he has also persuaded that person to be such a numerous brother that he will eat all the local wheat himself, then the birth-rate philanthropist will feel that he has not lived in vain. There is every reason to believe that he will have his reward, for the colored man responds with enthusiasm to kindly treatment. There were some 3,000,000 folk in Java about 120 years ago, but Dutch paternalism has raised the number to very nearly 30,000,000. The families are surprisingly large and appear to consist mostly of twins. Another century at the same rate should find the Japanese numbering 250,000,000. The population of Egypt has doubled in thirty years. And even the lands-mostly tropical-that are as yet unused and available are not necessarily available for the growth of food. To-day England probably requires as much land on which to grow rubber wherewith to make tyres for its motor-car as it required for all purposes in the days when Charles II. was King. It would be unpleasant to suggest that a time may actually arrive when one-half-the better-armed half-of the world's nations will meet in congress to devise means of extirpating the worse-armed half in order that there may be breathing-room. That gigantic tragedy may come, but the less said about the possibility the better. Still, certain facts have to be faced. As recently as the year 1800 the two Americas might almost be called emptyNorth America especially so. Within one hundred and ten years they have filled up at such a gigantic pace that, supposing the movement to continue, another century will see them fairly well settled. Already Rhode Island (U.S.A.) bas 508 people to the square mile, Massachusetts 419, and the District of Columbia 5517; so no one can deny that the filling up process is going on apace. At the same time, Australia, the last of the empty continents, had made such progress that another two centuries should see it as densely occupied as a country with a sparse rainfall is likely to be. The European countries whose surplus inhabitants colonized these new lands have multiplied their populations three or fourfold in a century, despite the relief they gained by the wholesale export of population. There is still room for very great improvement in the science of agriculture, but on the other hand very great improvement has already been made, and it has not kept pace, or even made a decent pretence of keeping pace, with the demand. The steadily lengthening list of countries which depend more or less on outside supplies for their breakfast, lunch and dinner is evi dence to that effect. It is already a fairly long list, and the fact that it has, to all intents and purposes, been accumulated in one lifetime is an impressive circumstance. The last century or so has been a sort of world-drunk-the world's one magnificent drunk. Man has gone on a "burst," and been drinking up a planet all at once. The human race has been really proud of its deed. Science has helped the work along. Humanitarianism has lent it all possible assistance. The Church has blessed it, and laid down the theory that any stoppage or even diminution of the proceeding is unscriptural. The two outstanding features of the period have been an incredible increase of the old food demand accompanied by an actual diminution of the possible area of supply through the turning of cornfields or possible cornfields into cities, and the invention of all sorts of new demands to meet the necessities of an increasingly complex civilization. Another two centuries or so of expansion at the present rate is calculated to make the old countries of the world a herd of dreary regions. They will contain no quiet spot in which two lovers may get out of sight of their prying fellow creatures-no place where a man may propose to a maid save in the presence of six listeners-no leafy retreat where a bard may compose a scrap of verse without a dozen onlookers pointing over his shoulder at a dubious rhyme. Even the homicide will have to leave the body of his victim on the roof unless he is prepared to bury it in the full glare of publicity. In the England of some three centuries hence, with its two thousand million people—assuming the much-valued birth-rate to continue mankind will probably sleep eight in a bed, and seclusion will be the luxury of the very rich. Possibly even they will not always be able to buy the article. |