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,