In the first place, our farmers and our cornmerchants would be in the long run as much affected by a national disaster arising from stoppage of our foreign food supplies as any other class of the community. What would it benefit them if at the beginning of a great war and for some time after they made fortunes out of the rest of the nation, if it turned out-as I fully believe it might turn outthat in the end their utmost endeavours to supply bread at any price were hopelessly inadequate? Every farmer and every cornmerchant in this country is as much interested in this question as are any other of our millions of bread-eaters.

It has been suggested to me by authorities in the corn trade that it might be quite possible when forming the reserve to use a large proportion of home-grown wheat-say, one-third-as a mixture of two-thirds foreign and one-third home-grown wheat keeps well and forms the best combination for producing good bread.

But this question and the question of the amount of the reserve could only be settled by a Royal Commission. I see that Mr. Robert

A. Yerburgh, M.P. (whose scheme for a reserve of corn I shall refer to later on), suggests that about ten million quarters would be enough.

I took twenty-five million as my basis simply because that is the amount we actually imported in 1895; and it must never be forgotten that we import a still larger quantity of other grain, which comes from the same countries as our wheat supply.

I had some idea, but not until I had seen the criticisms of the corn-trade papers on my article had I any adequate idea of the enormous extent of our utter dependence for bread alone on the goodwill of foreigners. I found then that the Miller, one of the leading papers in the corn trade, had for years past been pointing to this national danger.

I can only hope that some national tribunal may be appointed-such as a Royal Commission, to include experts and members of both houses of Parliament, to consider the question; and no one hopes more than I do that they may prove either that there is no necessity for such an insurance against famine as I propose, or that, if there is, that some better scheme than mine may be found.

I have been called a faddist, a panicmonger, and a protectionist-for which I care nothing. The only protection I want is from the possibility of the horrors of famine in this country, arising from the fact that we are all living on food grown by nations which have it in their absolute power to refuse us that food.

CHAPTER III.

SOME CRITICISMS AND REPLIES.

BEFORE giving some criticisms on the article in the Nineteenth Century, reprinted in the preceding chapter, I should like to give some idea of the stupendous quantity of wheat we import, and to reiterate that, enormous as it is, it is only half the total amount of grain imported, which includes maize, barley, oats, rye, etc.

TWENTY-FIVE MILLION QUARTERS OF WHEAT.

It is difficult, in fact impossible, to realize what an enormous amount of food this means. A rough idea may be got from the following illustration, which a friend, a railway engineer, kindly worked out for me:

It means that if twenty-five quarters is allowed as a load (average) of a railway goods

waggon, it would require a million such railway goods waggons, and, divided into trains of twenty-five trucks, it would require forty thousand engines, and would occupy, with brakes, three thousand seven hundred and forty-eight miles, or seven hundred miles more than the distance between Liverpool and New York.

THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHEOPS.

Its

"The great pyramid of Cheops is the largest structure ever erected by the hand of man. original dimensions at the base were seven hundred and sixty-four feet square, and its perpendicular height in the highest point, four hundred and eighty-eight feet; it covers four acres, one rood, and twenty-two rods of ground, and has been estimated by an eminent English architect to have cost not less than thirty-three million pounds sterling. It was begun 2170 B.C. It is estimated that about five million tons of hewn stone were used in its construction, and the evidence shows that these stones were brought from quarries in Arabia, about seven hundred miles distant."

I have never seen the great pyramid of Cheops, but I give these particulars about it,