Cheap ocean freights, which make it possible to transfer a bushel of wheat by sea from Montreal or New York to London at a lower price than it can be carried by rail from some English counties to London, handicap the English producer still more. It seems as if the dependence upon the outside world for grain supplies were likely to increase, not merely with the rapid increase of population which is still going on, but with the necessity of applying the land to more profitable forms of production as ocean transit is still further cheapened, and as increasing prosperity leads to a greater consumption of animal food.
{105}
As with grain foods so with meat. Hundreds of thousands of live cattle, many hundred thousand tons of meat, chilled, frozen, salted, or tinned, pour into the country every year from across the sea. Canada alone last year sent 123,000 head of cattle; New Zealand nearly 1,500,000 frozen carcasses of sheep. It has been estimated that the quantity of meat food in the United Kingdom at any time is only sufficient to supply the market for three months; beyond that all must come from without.
So also with cheese, fruit, and other staple articles of consumption. Still more striking is the dependence on distant lands for a wide range of articles once esteemed luxuries, but now reckoned among the comforts, if not the necessities, of daily life, such as sugar, tea, and coffee. If the massing of facts into figures best conveys to some minds the nature of the situation it may be put in the statement that every year the United Kingdom pays for articles used for food brought from abroad the sum of £153,000,000 sterling. Or it may be better illustrated by a comparison. Draw around almost any other nation or country of modern times—Germany, Italy, Russia, the United States, Canada, Australia—a barrier preventing the ingress of any food supply from the outer world. There will be inconvenience, some measure of restriction of consumption in a few particulars, but the condition is one which could be endured not merely for months but for years. Place a like barrier around the British Islands and {106} in six weeks the pressure of want will begin to be felt; in six months starvation will be the prevalent condition of the population.
Such a picture is, of course, imaginary—the fact which lies behind it is stern reality.
The illustration emphasizes, but does not exaggerate, the absolutely unique nature of the national position.
For the first time in the course of human history we have had in the last half century presented to us in the British Islands the spectacle of a great people depending for its existence upon the safe and continuous transport from the most remote corners of the globe of about two-thirds of the chief articles of daily consumption.
That the outlook of such a people upon the world should differ fundamentally from that of any other people of past times or of the present day is manifest. What has been said is not meant to prove that the situation is one which should necessarily induce extraordinary anxiety. Difficulties are to be measured by the resources at hand to grapple with them. Danger only comes when the sense of proportion between the two is lost.
Food is not all. Britain the workshop of the world, and three-fourths of its working population artizans! Upon what do these vast armies of industry, these millions of working men and women, spend their toil to earn the wages that buy the food thus brought to them from such great distances and at {107} such expense? Once more we find the ends of the earth scoured to furnish them with the raw material upon which they work. Wool from Australia, New Zealand, India, Africa, South America; cotton from the Southern States, India, Egypt; timber from Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, Honduras; precious metals, ores, jute, hemp and other fibres, oils, gums, ivory, shells, hides, furs, precious stones—everything that can be moulded for use or beauty, all productions of land and sea, are poured forth day by day from the holds of a thousand ships in the greater ports of the United Kingdom to be transferred to the centres of British industry.
The critical character of this dependence for a perfectly steady supply of raw material is under modern conditions as striking as the extent of the dependence. The great Yorkshire woollen spinners tell us that to be cut off even for three or four weeks from the supplies of Australian wool would mean the closing of hundreds or thousands of factories and a widespread paralysis of industry. They point out that when the regularity of sea transport depended upon wind and weather, or when the home market supplied a larger share of the material, common prudence made it necessary to lay in heavy stocks to provide against contingencies for many months. So fixed has now become the habit of depending upon the regular arrival of ocean steam-ships from week to week, the regular sequence of great wool sales at frequent stated periods, that it is possible {108} in manufacturing to live as it were from hand to mouth; that, as a matter of fact, a large proportion of manufacturers do so live, purchasing only enough for their immediate wants, and renewing their stock at very short intervals. Thus the effect of any stoppage of sea-transport would be disastrously felt at once, reaching in its influence alike the manufacturing capitalist and the workman in his cottage.