MAN-POWER AND FOOD.
I ET any one look at Mr. Lloyd George's prorogation speech
and see how he dealt with these problems. In the matter of Man-Power, an essential matter, the account of his stewardship for the past year is absolutely barren. He did not profess to say that in the precious year that has gone by he had increased our Man-Power. He did not even venture to make any great promises here. All he did was to tell us that we shall hear something more about the matter on Janu- ary 15th, We may be pretty sure that if he were going to make the whole of the United Kingdom, and not merely a part of it, do its duty and bear its burden, he would have given us some inkling of the good news. All he, in effect, told us was that the Trade Union leaders, whose essential patriotism, let us say at once, we have never doubted for an instant, are to be asked to release the Government from certain pledges which ought never to have been made, but which, happily, owing to the good sense of Mr. Henderson, were of a strictly conditional character. Here we should like to ask three plain questions. (1) Were any pledges given by the Prime Minister to the Irish Nationalists with regard to the application of Compulsory Service to Ireland ? (2) If they were given, were they, too, guarded by a clause with regard to "the necessities of war," as were the pledges to Labour ? (3) And if not, why not ? But we have said enough on this point. The damning fact remains that in December, 1916, we all expected that this was a wheel to which Mr. Lloyd George would instantly put his shoulder, and that he has, in effect, done nothing for a whole year but "wait and talk" instead of moving the wheel. But then, will say his thick- and-thin supporters, what courage he has got 1 We are sometimes inclined, to paraphrase his own dictum, to wish that he had less. Apparently he is not even frightened by the grim, remorseless, insatiate spectre of "Too late,'' though a year ago he invoked that spectre to ruin his chief and colleague.
Once more, we are no further advanced in the matter of man-power than we were a year ago. We ought to have had a quarter of a million men from Ireland already in training nay, already trained. Instead of that, the only training which has been allowed to the youth of Ireland is that given them by the Sinn Feiners—by the declared and deadly enemies of Great Britain, by the men who have openly: told us that the Germans are their friends, the side they wish to win. The Irishmen who have been trained in the year that has passed have been largely trained by the expenditure of German gold, and in some cases armed with rifles and machine-guns which have been smuggled into Ireland under a rigitne in which the mot d'ordre to the police has been : "Give the Convention a chance by not harrying the Sinn Feiners too greatly."
If Mr. Lloyd George's account of his stewardship is deeply disappointing in the matter of Man-Power for the Army, it is equally bad in the matter of what we have termed the arraying of the whole nation for war. Here Mr. Lloyd George has not got even the poor excuse that the Labour Party, or the Nationalists and the Sinn Feiners, would not let him do what he knew he ought to do. The arraying of the nation, by the bringing up to date of the National Register and basing upon it a scheme of National Service, under which every man and every woman should have assigned to them the work required of them (of course, at full war-time wages, and not under any system which could possibly be called conscription of labour), would have automatically put an end to those luxury trades which are now demoralizing the nation. The arraying of the nation would stop the lavish displays in our shop-windows, and the equally lavish incitements to unnecessary expenditure encouraged by the greater part of the Daily Press. If the whole nation had been arrayed for war, no one would have dared to say to any man, or even to any woman : "It shall be your business in the crisis of the nation's fate to make and sell fur mantles, or fur sets at twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty guineas apiece; yours to offer satin petticoats at from ten to nineteen pounds each ; yours to draw up the incitements to expenditure for our journals ; yours to use paper, print, and ink to set them daily before the public." There has been no arraying of the nation. There was a feeble attempt at it, in which an able, patriotic, and conscientious man, Mr. Neville Chamberlain, was required, as he has just told us, to accomplish an impossible task. He was told to go and tackle the problem of National Service, but when he got to details he found that what was meant was an exhibition to the world of the wondrous powers of political camouflage. That was a job in which he may be proud to have failed completely !
In the matter of Food our disappointment is as great as in that of Man-Power. When the Government came in there were few serious-minded people who did not feel sure, in view of their promises, that they would at once have recourse to rationing ; or, to put the case in a wider way, that they would at once have taken up a strict and active policy of Food Conservation. It was not in their power at once to increase very greatly the supply from the land, but they had it in their power to do two things. They could have cut down the national consumption of all classes in essential foods to the minimum-of-health level. This they did not do, though if they had done it at once we should now be the better by many thousands of tons of food. We should have gone a long way towards victualling the nation, and building up that year's supply always in reserve for which we have called so loudly in these columns ever since the war began. There were other ways of increasing our food supply by cutting down consumption which, if carried out without fear and Without favour—i.e., without fear of the working-man con- sumer, and without favour to the brewers—would have saved immense stores of cereals and of sugar. If the nation could see before it the barrels of sugar and the heaps of barley and oats and other foodstuffs which have gone into the beer-tub--i.e., which would now have been in the national store-cupboard—they would be amazed to think that any Government in a beleaguered city could have acted as Mr. Lloyd George's Administration have acted during 1917. Remember, we are making no fanatical teetotal demand, no attempt to put alcohol under any ban, moral or hygienic, but merely dealing with the plain practical point iliad we cannot just now afford to turn food into intoxicants, and that such alcohol as is needed Land we believe it often is needed)
for medicinal purposes should be supplied from the grape or the apple.
Take one other point, significant of much. The Govern- ment, through the whole of the past year, while considerably increasing the barrelage of beer allowed when they took office, have not had the pluck to deal properly with the feeding of racehorses. We note that Mr. Faber, an old racing Member, on the day that Parliament adjourned, to his great credit asked whether, now that such prime necessaries as pigs and poultry are actually prohibited from having even the tail-ends of wheat, it is really necessary in the beat and truest interests of the country that not racehorses but geld- ings should be allowed to amuse certain classes of the popula- tion during the winter months. Somebody, we must presume (possibly the newspapers that depend for their circulation upon sporting news and sporting" tips "), desperately wanted racing, and even winter racing, to go on, and therefore there will be this criminal waste of oats. Even if a certain number of steeplechasers and inferior racehorses had died or been slaughtered, there would have been no great loss to the nation, for it has always been agreed that our best stud horses re- quired for breeding should be kept alive. Even in Ireland geldings are not kept to improve the breed. The Govern- ment, however, have gone far beyond breeding requirements. In order to keep up the amusement of racing, and under the flimsiest pretence of military necessity, they are encouraging the second-rate and debased part of the national sport at the expense of the food of the people. We write not as disgruntled kill-joys, but as passionate lovers of that noble . creature, the English thoroughbred.
But we have said enough as to Mr. Lloyd George's failure to give an account of his stewardship. We must say some- thing now as to the speech itself. It was, as we have said, deeply disappointing. His handling of the Food Problem can only be described as childish. He babbled about margarine and butter, and about what the Food Controller was going to do to abolish the queues of would-be buyers of tea and other foods. But terrible as we fear has been the suffering of many working men and women who have had to stand in queues, this is not the vital issue. The scandal of bad distribution, for such it is, can and must be put right. The test question is : What has Mr. Lloyd George to tell us about a rigid Food Conservation effort in the past year ? Nothing. If some day men approach him in the spirit of the Roman Emperor who asked Yarns to give him back his legions, and require at his hands the food wasted on Beer and Steeplechasers, what will be his answer
Upon the Naval and Military position, and the problem of Ship-building, touched on by Mr. Lloyd George, we shall be reticent of comment. In regard to Shipbuilding, though a great deal has been done and though we do not take a tragic view of the situation, done, Lloyd George had to resort to excuses. Even in this absolutely vital matter we have not , done during the past year what we ought to have done, and what we could have done if the Government had laid their :plans better and more truly. We are not going into the question of War Aims. It was an easy task for Mr. Lloyd George, and one well accomplished, we are glad to say, to answer the ridiculous charge that we have not stated our war aims. They have been stated again and again quite clearly, and they are fair and reasonable aims. They are absolutely free from greed, or sordid Imperialism, or injustice. If they err, they err not from being too drastic, but from not being drastic enough. The only objection we have to make here concerns a certain care- lessness of language shown by Mr. Lloyd George—a careless- ness which may also be observed in the speeches of other Ministers. Mr. Lloyd George quotes himself as having talked at Glasgow about " a great International Peace Congress," and of a Peace Congress which, in respect to the German colonies, shall settle the matter on the principle of respecting the desires of the peoples themselves." Surely the Prime Minister does not really mean that we are to have a great international pow-wow or palaver-shop set up in some neutral capital. What we presume he means is not an International Conference for settling peace, at which neutrals who have never struck a blow for freedom are tube repre- sented, and the degraded, disreputable tyrants with whom we are fighting, the despots of Germany, Austria, Turkey, and Bulgaria, will sit as our friends and equals, but a Confer- ence of the Allies. It is they, and they alone, who will state the terms upon which peace can be granted. Surely it is worth while to use a little accuracy in a matter of such vital import. The Germans are not to be allowed to . spring like some wild beast upon the back of Europe and
almost tear the heart out of the civilized world, and then be called in to settle how we may prevent such appalling outrages and horrors in the future. When the lamb has been saved from the wolf, we have never before heard of the wolf being called into the councils of the "Society for the Preservation of Young Sheep."
But Mr. Lloyd George and his speech have kept us too long. On a future occasion we must deal with the political situation created by the disappointment which, we are certain, will very soon manifest itself, not only among political critics, but in the country' at large.
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