Another Sheaf

ing experienced any sharp starvation, and go our ways to trade, to eat, and forget-What then? It is about twenty years since the first submarine could navigate-and

hat tens are now; thousands of mach

ture we act as we have in the past-rather the habit of this country-I can imagine that in fifteen years' time or so we shall be well enough prepared agains

nd ready to serve their country at a moment's notice, by taking a little flight and dropping a little charge of an explosive many times more destructive than any in use now. The agility of submarines and flying machines will grow almost indefinitely. And even if we carry our commerce under the sea instead of on the surface, we shall not be guaranteed against attack by air. The air menace is, in

is war sprang; that no nation may teach in its schools that it is God's own people, entitled to hack through, without consideration of others; that professors may be no longer blind to all sense of proportion; Emperors things of the past; diplomacy open and responsible; a real Court of Nations at work; Military Chiefs unable to stampede a situation; journalists obliged to sign their names and held accountable for inflamma

war will make no difference to our future situation. A little peaceful study and development of submarines and aircraft will antiquate our present antidotes. You cannot chain air and th

and never shall again. Not even by linking ourselves to Europe can we place ourselves in security from Europe. Faith may remove mountains, but

ay of making even reasonably safe is to grow our own food. If for years to come we have to supplement by State granaries, they must be placed underground; not even there will they be too secure. Unless we grow our own food after this war we shall be the onl

in the future, the internal activities of those nations will remain unfettered, capabl

marine-cum-air menace of peace time a few years hence. It will be impossible to guard against surprise un

anger to our future just as formidable-the desertion of o

rmers, better kinds of manure and seed, encouragement to co-operative societies, a cheerful spirit, and the storage of tw

to the physical and moral welfare of our race, except this: "That boys should be in touch with country life and country tastes is of first importance, and that their elementary education should be given in t

ition. Whatever happens in this war, we have lost the last two in all but a superficial sense. Let us see wheth

fifths of the population of England was rural, in 1911 only about two-ninths was rural. This transformation has given us great wealth, extremely ill-distributed; plastered our country with scores of busy, populous, and hideous towns; given us a merchant fleet which before the war had a gross tonnage of over 20,000,000, or not far short of half the world's shipping. It has, or had, fixed in us the genteel habi

lementary disadvantages, some of which we have

foreign stuff, because we are a practical people and prefer shekels to sentiment. We do not mind being parasitic. Taking no interest nationally in the growth of food, we take no interest nationally in the cooking of it; the two accomplishments subtly hang together. Pride in the food capacity, the corn and wine and oil, of their country has made the cooking of the French the most appetising and nourishing in the world. The French do cook: we open tins. The French preserve the juices of their home-grown food: we have no juices to preserve. The lif

r wealth. They are the growth, roughly speaking, of five generations. They began at a time when social science was unknown, spread and grew in unchecked riot of individual moneymaking, till they are the nightmare of social reformers, and the despair of all lovers of beauty. They have mastered us so utterly, morally and physically, that we r

e, Westminster Bridge, and Piccadilly-in May of this year, only 310 had any pretensions to not being very plain or definitely ugly-not one in five. And out of that 310 only eleven had what might be called real beauty. Out of 120 British soldiers observed round Charing Cross, sixty-just one-half-passed the same standard. But out of seventy-two Australian soldiers, fifty-four, or three-quarters, passed, and several had real beauty. Out of 120 men, women, and children taken at random in a remote country village (five miles from any town, and eleven mile

tirely to the facts that they grow nearly all their own food (and cook it well), and had in 1906 four-sevenths of their population in the country as against our own two-ninths in 1911, because there is the considerable matter of climate. But when you get so high a proportion of comeliness in remote country districts in England, it is fair to assume that climate does not account for anything like all the difference. I do not believe t

good-looking; the rest pass unremarked. Ugliness has become a matter of course. There is no reason, save town life, why this should be so. But what does it matter if we have become ugly? We work well, make money, and have lots of m

there were, those faces and limbs would pass my standard. The old Greek cult of the body was not to be despised. I defy even the most rigid Puritans to prove that a satisfactory moral condition can go on within an exterior which exhibits no signs of a live, able, and serene existence. By living on its nerves, overworking its body, star