If we are to accept Mr. Prothero’s statement, the most important line of “national service” is this food production. Then, let him take action and not listen to hearsay or report. Let him see for himself the thousands of acres in this country waiting to be cultivated and to produce richly and royally all that is needed for the population. Let there be common sense organisation in each district—not “compulsion”; the people are too cheerfully brave and willing to be “compelled.” But no one cares to work in the dark without a plan, and without any encouragement. They are told to “produce food,” but are denied labour to produce it. The capable field-worker is taken, and inefficient substitutes sent instead—men who do not know how to plant a root or sow a seed, with the obvious result that plants and seeds represent so much money thrown away. But, once more to emphasise the need of common sense, let us hold fast the fact that no lack of food is possible to this country if things are properly organised. And as we see by report that, despite U-boats, ships laden with useful cargoes are constantly arriving in our ports, let us not forget the possibility of “the creation of that artificial scarcity” which stirred the blood and roused the devil in Russia!
OUR FORTUNATE “RESTRICTIONS”
(Published in the “Pall-Mall Gazette”)
The Germans are reported to be in ecstasy over what they call the “despairing appeal” of the Prime Minister’s great “restrictions” speech. But, however great their “ecstasy” may be, it can hardly equal ours! For we have sufficient sense to see what hope and strength for our Empire springs, like a bright rainbow, from what the Boche obtusely imagines is a cloud. Our “lead” is towards increasing prosperity and happiness for all. We are invited to look forward to a self-supporting country; we are given fresh chances of barring the ungrateful Teuton from our trades by showing him that we can do all our own work ourselves. We are promised another “Merrie England” of the spacious days of yore, when foreign supplies were rare and costly, and when all the fields were thick with golden grain and all the orchards glowed with many-coloured fruits and the agricultural population were given the chance to reap what they had sown.
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Now, in our lovely rural villages we may perhaps hope to see the last of many frowsy, idle sluts who for years have preferred to gossip away their time rather than do any useful work; and in their stead we may look for healthy, active girls and women who are proud of their dairies and poultry farms, and glad to show interested customers the great bowls of milk, the churning of butter, the making of cheese, and all the endless charms of “country” work well done. If the submarine menace teaches us to produce all the food that can be produced in these islands, it will be a blessing in disguise, a helper and saviour of the grit, stability, and fine reasonableness of the British race. Talk of potatoes! There are many hundred of acres of waste land in South Cornwall alone, notably wide, treeless fields running into sand dunes by the sea, where the potato would flourish as well as it does in similar Dutch soil, and all this precious land is empty and untilled. To urge the digging up of parks and public recreation grounds, where it is doubtful whether potatoes would grow at all, when there is all this acreage available, is sheer nonsense. I would that I had even a hundred acres of that Cornish sandy soil by the sea just now. With a few skilled labourers (for one must know how to plant potatoes) it should yield gold! At Newquay, by the way, there is a golfing ground reserved for the amusement of a dozen or so of privileged selfish persons; it would grow tons of potatoes and other good edibles with very little trouble.
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Nothing has ever been a greater source of wonder to me than the improvidence of such British folk as prefer to buy their vegetables and fruit food rather than grow it. Nowhere are allotments so untidily kept or so altogether neglected as in certain parts of England; nowhere is so little grown in them. Surely it stands to sense that if each cottager grew his own vegetable and fruit food there would be less need for foreign supplies. And if every waste field were made to produce something in the way of foods a submarine blockade must needs prove futile in any attempt to starve the population. We may, if we will, foresee the vision of a happier, grander Britain than ever, when the people of these fruitful islands are given their own, and no longer have need to sever their lives from the homes of their kindred because there is no work for them here owing to the intrusion of German influence and German labour. We might also consider with belated sorrow the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands, and the preservation of vast tracts of moor and forest for mere “sport,” which has for years been a scandal and a disgrace to the nation. Let us have the people back on the land, and let the deer and the grouse take their own wild chances of existence. The submarine menace has come to teach us what we ought to have learned long ago—namely, that what we want on our own land are our own men, as skilled farmers and workers in every useful and profitable department, and that it ought never to be possible to see, as I once saw posted up on a large factory in London itself: “No English Need Apply.”
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