This ought to cure any delicacy he might start with.
TO LORD RHONDDA.
DEAR LORD RHONDDA,—When you were an unassuming undergraduate at Caius College, spending your leisure-time in an eight- or a pair-oar, and stirring up the muddy shallows of the Cam, as you did to some purpose, I cannot believe that any premonitions of the heights of celebrity to which you would some day attain disturbed your mind. And yet here you are, a survivor from the foul and murderous shattering of the Lusitania, a coal-owner, a member of the Government, a peer, and the Food-Controller of a whole nation at war.
Your predecessor, Lord DEVONPORT, had no very happy experience of the post you now hold, and I can well understand that his life during his tenure of it cannot have been a pleasant one. Every crank with an infallible recipe for catching sunbeams in cucumber-frames and turning them into potatoes, or whatever might be the fashionable food at the moment; every grumbler who imagined that every rise in prices must be entirely due to the malignity of men and not to the scarcity of the article; every politician with a grudge to satisfy or an axe to grind—all these pounced upon Lord DEVONPORT as a victim made ready to their hands, and gave him a time which can only be described as a very bad one. Add to this the mistakes almost necessarily made by an office which was entirely new and dealt with unexampled conditions, and it is not on the whole surprising that difficulties were encountered and that the right way for overcoming them was not always taken. Indeed there was or there seemed to be at one time a lively controversy between Lord DEVONPORT and Mr. PROTHERO about the true meaning of the words maximum and minimum as applied to prices, and we were left to infer that these Latin monsters are virtually indistinguishable from one another.
However, all that is now over; Lord RHONDDA reigns in Lord DEVONPORT'S place and can profit by his experience. I don't want to delude you into the belief that all is plain sailing for you. You couldn't be made to believe that if I tried for a month of Sundays, and I don't mean to spend my time to no purpose. But I think the great body of the nation is determined that you shall have fair play and will support you through thick and thin in any policy, no matter how drastic, that you may recommend to their reason and their patriotism. This business of food-controlling is new to us as well as to you, but we are willing to be led, we are even willing to be driven, and we are grateful to you for having engaged your reputation and your skill and your firmness in the task of leading or driving us. And if in the course of your duty you encounter any genuine rascal endeavouring to grind the faces of the poor or to find his own profit in the misery of his fellow-men we look to you to give him short shrift.
I am, my Lord, with all goodwill, your Lordship's obliged and faithful Servant,
THE GATE OF HUMILITY.
