The Birmingham age-herald., 1917-03-18

the brown old earth and from the funda- mental realities of national existence At last came the war, first with q very slow dawning of the truth and then, to most men, after more than two years, with a mental revelation like an open Ing Of the heavens and earth. We found that subsistence was neither cheap nor
 safe. We found we had been fed almost equally on foreign products and home lies. We realized that the case was one l or grave severity and pressure: that the agricultural decline in this country never ought to have been permitted and must
 never be allowed to recur: that nothing 1 could avert deadly peril in the war not guarantee sane position afterwards but drastic inconvenience, enormous effort prodigious expense and the revolution- ary revision of our whole national policy. Created by free imports and home neg i feet, the fools paradise of Britain has been shattered about our ears
 For the cumulative folly of two gen. erations We must pay dearly now in
 money and trouble, but we would have paid for it in the end with national death were not the lesson we'll learned.
 In a word what we have undiscovered is the primeval fact that the food uues-
 ton Is at the bottom of every other
 question, big and little; that everything else is built on the food supply; that here, as elsewhere, the best use of our own land at home must be the founda- ton of society; and that this necessity must henceforth come first in the war and after the war, no matter what else comes second.
 THE UNFORESEEN CHANGE before we can understand the surface
 facts of this problem we must get at it's roots' We must come little closer to
 It's history. We must understand how and why a situation was created never contemplated at the outset by econom- ists or any school. Adam Smith believed that argicultural prosperity must be the oasis Of all national well-being and never ought to be injured or displaced by any other influence. Malthus urged similar views, maintaining that national agricul- lure must be upheld at any price by outies or otherwise, though he advocated Tree trade in every other direction Other economists, like Ricardo and McCulloch, asserted that the rural interest could not pc damaged by free trade but that special sa1eguards-"a fixed duty of 5s or 7s' said McCullocl--ought to be adopted to make assurance doubly sure. III the House of Commons Charles Vil- uers, especially called the parliamentary
 Idther of free trade,'' laughed to scorn
 the mad notion that imported wheat could ever be more than a fraction of the home supply.
 On the same theme Golden himself wa & as usual, lucid, emphatic and convincing.
 lie sad, when urging Parliament to re- peal the corn laws: "We do not contem- piate deriving one-quarter less corn from
 the soil of this country: we expect to nave great increase in productions, He
 maintained again and again that his pol
 icy would only lower rents, not prices that 1t would not throw one acre out of cuitivation-that, indeed. no interest
 would benefit more by the new system than the agricultural interest. Nor is that all Sir Robert Peel hin1selr assured
 the farmers that there was no danger 10 nome cultivation from foreign importa
 tion-no real risk to the safety and great
 ness Of British tillage. It is absolutely
 certain and indisputable tina, the free
 trade majority in 1s46 never contemplated
 the present situation. They would have been mortified to conceive our, actual war emergency. Could a right view into the future have been granted to them they would have taken the strongest measures to defend and secure the full productive ness of the soil and the relative pros perity of agriculture as the national basis.