SOME SPECIFIC PROPOSALS. • W E have dealt in the article
that precedes this with the general aspects of the Food question. Here we want to point the road to definite action. The nation has to get much closer down to the work before it. Mr. Kennedy Jones has given us an admirable sketch of what the nation needs to be taught, but that is not the same as teaching. As we explained last week, what we have to accomplish is the education of the people. We have to make them understand the need and meet it. We adhere as strongly as ever to our suggestion that we must make use of the mandate of the Proclamation, in which the nation's Ministers, through the mouth of the King, shall tell every inhabitant of the land his or her duty and explain to them how to carry it out. We also showed how the churches should be used in this work of education. To these suggestions we may add one or two more possible methods. Parliament still remains the great bounding-board by which to catch the popular ear. Let the matter be debated fully in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and let every Member of Parliament see to it that his constituents understand the issue before them. Wheu it is a question of some miserable party scuffle, Members of Parliament know very well how to instruct the electors. Let them for once apply these same arts in a national instead of a sectional cause. Next, and this is perhaps the most important consideration of all, let there be formed throughout the length and breadth of the land Parish Committees, whose duty it shall be to explain, by house-to-house visitation, the need and how it may be met. And let the members of these Com- mittees never forget that though they must bring home to the people a sense of the tremendous danger before the nation, they must bring also that hope without which the sense of danger merely paralyses. They must make them understand that here is a peril which can be avoided, but can be avoided only in one way—by abstinence. If the abstinence is properly organized and complete, then we shall win through to victory. If it is not so organized, and we cat up on Monday what we shall want on Saturday, then we shall not only fail, but we shall suffer. Rich and poor, we shall die, though the corn- ships may be in the offing—die with the bitter sense that if as a nation we had only listened to wise counsel we might have pulled through, if hungry, yet not starved.
The first thing which those who undertake to teach the nation will have to make clear is that none must excuse to him- self his selfishness or his giving rein to appetite by the feeling : " I'd be willing to do it if others would do it ; but I know they won't, so I sha'n't." The effort must be made to con- vince the people that if they do their duty, that duty is of such a compelling nature that in the end, even if somewhat late and grudgingly, others will be forced to follow their example. The pride in duty done, the sense of chivalry, are tremendously strong forces in the world if once they can be got under way. The men in the trenches, as we may see in the cinematograph, when the order is given to go over the top do not wait upon each other, or look round to right or left to find out whether others are doing their duty. At the word, over they go like a pack of hounds. Private Jones jumps into No-Man's-Land " on his own " and without troubling to see whether Private Robinson on the one side and Private Smith on the other are also doing their duty. He assumes they will, and that he does assume it is known to each and all of them and is the cause which makes them do their duty. Duty may be quite as contagious as panic. Lastly, why should we not form a League among the well-to-do to secure abstinence from wheaten bread ? We suggest the follow- ing pledge : " I pledge myself to abstain from wheaten bread for the next five months unless cereal substitutes are unpro- curable or unless I am obliged by medical orders to use wheat." Such a pledge of honour should be taken by ten million people. If it were, we should be safe.
And now arises a practical point of no small difficulty. It will be comparatively easy in the villages of England and Scotland to get the people's homes canvassed, and knowledge imparted individually. In the great centres of popula- tion it will be far more difficult, because there the parish, instead of being a small and manageable unit, is often a vast agglomeration of houses. The unit must be artificially split up in many cases into a hundred smaller units, and these, if it would be too much to say that they do not already exist in some form or other, have not the same vitality which belongs to, the village. Still, the effort must be made. The Ward organization would no doubt be helpful in many Boroughs, but these again are often too large units to be tackled. And here we may remark how useful it would have been had the National Register everywhere been brought up to date. In that case the work of the small Committees such as we are suggesting would have been half done for them, for by study- ing the Register inthelight of local knowledge they would soon have found out who were the people on whom educational effort must be first concentrated. In such a movement as we are advocating the great thing is to light a candle, not to grope hopelessly in the dark, and such a candle—even if its rays were not all-illuminating—the National Register would prove. Another enormous advantage of Parish Committees and other Committees such as we have described is that if the voluntary effort fails and compulsory rationing has to come, they can be used to supplement, explain, and soften the harsher work that will have to be done by the police and other Government organizations. In former times we should have strongly advised members of the Committees engaged upon this work to tell people that if they did not do what was wanted of them, compulsion would come. Now, however, we are by no means sure that to make use of the threat of compulsory rationing would be wise policy. People would be inclined to say : " We would much rather have com- pulsion straight away, and be done with all this messing about."
Before we end there is one purely practical point to which we should like to draw the attention of the Director-General of Food Economy and his special Department. What very often prevents a strict economy in the use of wheaten bread is the difficulty which is usually experienced in country districts and among the poor in obtaining substitutes. Many bakers do not, and protest that they cannot, provide barley bread or oatmeal cake. In other words, to all those who do not bake themselves, and that is the vast majority of the people, the baker offers nothing but the Government standard bread. Could not Government pressure he brought to bear upon the bakers to induce them to provide bread and scones composed of barley, oatmeal, maize, rice, and malt ? No doubt bakers are inclined to say that it is impossible for them to obtain supplies of these commodities, or to bake them if they had them. The present writer knows, however, of country bakers who under the pressure of opinion have been induced to produce articles of this kind, and there seems little doubt that under Government direction the thing could be accomplished, with a great relief to the wheat supplies.
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