The Government has further had to regulate prices and prevent
profiteering. It has done so partly by controlling freights, fixing
maximum prices to the home producer, and regulating wholesale and retail
charges, and partly by its monopoly of imported supplies. The
information which the Government has obtained as to sources of supply,
consumption, and cost of production, and the relations it has entered
into with other Governments as to the mutual purchase of essential
products which they jointly control, have, for the first time, brought
within the sphere of practical politics the possibility of fixing
relatively stable world prices for fundamental staples. The State has
even taken the drastic step of fixing the price of the four-pound loaf
at 9d., at a considerable loss to itself.
Thus the war, and especially the year 1917, has brought about a
transformation of the social and administrative structure of the State,
much of which is bound to be permanent. Owing to the imperative
importance of speed there has perhaps been an undue expansion of the
function of the Central Government. But a very large amount of work has
been devolved on to local authorities and to new bodies, such as the War
Agricultural Executive Committees or the Local Food Control Committees.
Taking the year as a whole the Administration has been brought into far
closer contact with every aspect of the life of the people, the
provinces and the metropolis have been linked more closely together, and
the whole community has received an education in the problems of
practical democracy such as it has never had before.