I
If once more through ingenuity, courage, and good luck we find the
submarine menace "well in hand," and go to sleep again--if we reach the
end of the war without having 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 about seventeen
since flying became practicable. There are a good many years yet before
the world, and numberless developments in front of these new
accomplishments. Hundreds of miles are going to be what tens are now;
thousands of machines will take the place of hundreds.
We have ceased to live on an island in any save a technically
geographical sense, and the sooner we make up our minds to the fact, the
better. If in the future 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 against war of the same magnitude and
nature as this war, and that the country which attacks us will launch an
assault against defences as many years out of date.
I can imagine a war starting and well-nigh ending at once, by a quiet
and simultaneous sinking, from under water and from the air, of most
British ships, in port or at sea. I can imagine little standardised
submarines surreptitiously prepared by the thousand, and tens of
thousands of the enemy population equipped with flying machines,
instructed in flying as part of their ordinary civil life, and 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 fact, infinitely greater than that from
under water. I can imagine all shipping in port, the Houses of
Parliament, the Bank of England, most commercial buildings of
importance, and every national granary wrecked or fired in a single
night, on a declaration of war springing out of the blue. The only
things I cannot imagine wrecked or fired are the British character and
the good soil of Britain.
These are sinister suggestions, but there is really no end to what might
now be done to us by any country which deliberately set its own
interests and safety above all considerations of international right,
especially if such country were moved to the soul by longing for
revenge, and believed success certain. After this world-tragedy let us
hope nations may have a little sense, less of that ghastly provincialism
whence this 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 inflammatory writings. Let us hope, and let us by every means
endeavour to bring about this better state of the world. But there is
many a slip between cup and lip; there is also such a thing as hatred.
And to rely blindly on a peace which, at the best, must take a long time
to prove its reality, is to put our heads again under our wings. Once
bit, twice shy. We shall make a better world the quicker if we try
realism for a little.
Britain's situation is now absurdly weak, without and within. And its
weakness is due to one main cause--_the fact that we do not grow our own
food_. To get the better of submarines in this 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 the deeps to war uses and think you
have done with their devilish possibilities a score of years afterwards
because for the moment the submarine menace or the air menace is "well
in hand."
At the end of the war I suppose the Channel Tunnel will be made. And
quite time too! But even that will not help us. We get no food from
Europe, and never shall again. Not even by linking ourselves to Europe
can we place ourselves in security from Europe. Faith may remove
mountains, but it will not remove Britain to the centre of the Atlantic.
Here we shall remain, every year nearer and more accessible to secret
and deadly attack.
The next war, if there be one--which Man forbid--may be fought without
the use of a single big ship or a single infantryman. It may begin,
instead of ending, by being a war of starvation; it may start, as it
were, where it leaves off this time. And the only way 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 only great country which does not, and a constant
temptation to any foe. To be self-sufficing will be the first precaution
taken by our present enemies, in order that blockade may no longer be a
weapon in our hands, so far as _their_ necessary food is concerned.
Whatever arrangements the world makes after the war to control the
conduct of nations in the future, the internal activities of those
nations will remain unfettered, capable of deadly shaping and plausible
disguise in the hands of able and damnable schemers.
The submarine menace of the present is merely awkward, and no doubt
surmountable--it is nothing to the submarine-_cum_-air menace of peace
time a few years hence. _It will be impossible to guard against surprise
under the new conditions._ If we do not grow our own food, we could be
knocked out of time in the first round.
But besides the danger from overseas, we have an inland danger to our
future just as formidable--the desertion of our countryside and the
town-blight which is its corollary.
Despair seizes on one reading that we should cope with the danger of the
future by new cottages, better instruction to farmers, better kinds of
manure and seed, encouragement to co-operative societies, a cheerful
spirit, and the storage of two to three years' supply of grain.
Excellent and necessary, in their small ways--they are a mere stone to
the bread we need.
In that programme and the speech which put it forward I see insufficient
grasp of the outer peril and hardly any of the gradual destruction with
which our overwhelming town life threatens us; not one allusion 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 terms of country
things is also of enormous importance." That is all, and it shows how
far we have got from reality, and how difficult it will be to get
back; for the speaker was once Minister for Agriculture.
Our justifications for not continuing to feed ourselves were: Pursuit of
wealth, command of the sea, island position. Whatever happens in this
war, we have lost the last two in all but a superficial sense. Let us
see whether the first is sufficient justification for perseverance in a
mode of life which has brought us to an ugly pass.
Our wonderful industrialism began about 1766, and changed us from
exporting between the years 1732 and 1766 11,250,000 quarters of wheat
to importing 7,500,000 quarters between the years 1767 and 1801. In one
hundred and fifty years it has brought us to the state of importing more
than three-quarters of our wheat, and more than half our total food.
Whereas in 1688 (figures of Gregory and Davenant) about four-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 habit of eating very
doubtfully nutritious white bread made of the huskless flour of wheat;
reduced the acreage of arable land in the United Kingdom from its
already insufficient maximum of 23,000,000 acres to its 1914 figure of
19,000,000 acres; made England, all but its towns, look very like a
pleasure garden; and driven two shibboleths deep into our minds, "All
for wealth" and "Hands off the food of the people."
All these "good" results have had certain complementary disadvantages,
some of which we have just seen, some of which have long been seen.
Of these last, let me first take a small sentimental disadvantage. We
have become more parasitic by far than any other nation. To eat we have
to buy with our manufactures an overwhelming proportion of our vital
foods. The blood in our veins is sucked from foreign bodies, in return
for the clothing we give them--not a very self-respecting thought. We
have a green and fertile country, and round it a prolific sea. Our
country, if we will, can produce, with its seas, all the food we need to
eat. We know that quite well, but we elect to be nourished on 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 life of our
poorer classes is miserably stunted of essential salts and savours. They
throw away skins, refuse husks, make no soups, prefer pickle to genuine
flavour. But home-grown produce really is more nourishing than tinned
and pickled and frozen foods. If we honestly feed ourselves we shall not
again demand the old genteel flavourless white bread without husk or
body in it; we shall eat wholemeal bread, and take to that salutary
substance, oatmeal, which, if I mistake not, has much to say in making
the Scots the tallest and boniest race in Europe.
Now for a far more poignant disadvantage. We have become tied up in
teeming congeries, to which we have grown so used that we are no longer
able to see the blight they have brought on us. Our great industrial
towns, sixty odd in England alone, with a population of 15,000,000 to
16,000,000, are our glory, our pride, and the main source of our 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 regard them and their
results as matter of course. They _are_ public opinion, so that for the
battle against town-blight there is no driving force. They paralyse the
imaginations of our politicians because their voting power is so
enormous, their commercial interests are so huge, and the food
necessities of their populations seem so paramount.
I once bewailed the physique of our towns to one of our most cultivated
and prominent Conservative statesmen. He did not agree. He thought that
probably physique was on the up-grade. This commonly held belief is based
on statistics of longevity and sanitation. But the same superior
sanitation and science applied to a rural population would have
lengthened the lives of a much finer and better-looking stock. Here are
some figures: Out of 1,650 passers-by, women and men, observed in
perhaps the "best" district of London--St. James's Park, Trafalgar
Square, 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 miles
from any town of 10,000 inhabitants) ninety--or just three-quarters
also--pass this same standard of looks. It is significant that the
average here is the same as the average among Australian soldiers, who,
though of British stock, come from a country as yet unaffected by town
life. You ask, of course, what standard is this? A standard which covers
just the very rudiments of proportion and comeliness. People in small
country towns, I admit, have little or no more beauty than people in
large towns. This is curious, but may be due to too much inbreeding.
The first counter to conclusions drawn from such figures is obviously:
"The English are an ugly people." I said that to a learned and æsthetic
friend when I came back from France last spring. He started, and then
remarked: "Oh, well; not as ugly as the French, anyway." A great error;
much plainer if you take _the bulk, and not the pick_, of the population
in both countries. It may not be fair to attribute French superiority in
looks entirely 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 that the English are naturally an ugly
people. The best English type is perhaps the handsomest in the world.
The physique and looks of the richer classes are as notoriously better
than those of the poorer classes as the physique and looks of the remote
country are superior to those of crowded towns. Where conditions are
free from cramp, poor air, poor food, and _herd-life_, English physique
quite holds its own with that of other nations.
We do not realise the great deterioration of our stock, the squashed-in,
stunted, disproportionate, commonised look of the bulk of our people,
because, as we take our walks abroad, we note only faces and figures
which strike us as 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 moral qualities. A fair inside is
better than a fair outside. I do think that we are in many ways a very
wonderful people; and our townsfolk not the least wonderful. But that is
all the more reason for trying to preserve our physique.
Granted that an expressive face, with interest in life stamped on it, is
better than "chocolate box" or "barber's block" good looks, that agility
and strength are better than symmetry without agility and strength; the
trouble is that there is no interest stamped on so many of our faces,
no agility or strength in so many of our limbs. If 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, starving its normal aspirations for
fresh air, good food, sunlight, and a modicum of solitude, a country can
get a great deal out of itself, a terrific lot of wealth, in three or
four generations; but it is living on its capital, physically speaking.
This is precisely what we show every sign of doing; and partly what I
mean by "town-blight."