Ever since the war began Germany has used all possible means to starve the people of these islands. She sank our food ships in the first months of the war-as many as she could reach with her wandering cruisers—and she developed her submarine service for the same purpose. As soon as she thought she had enough submarines for the work she declared a close blockade of our coasts, and is now and has been doing her very utmost to starve us out. What have we been doing? In the first year of the war, as is admitted on all hands, there was practically no blockade at all.

German shipping was of course stopped, and neutrals were searched for contraband; but all manner of vital necessities were not contraband and were allowed to go through. The Navy was compelled to stand by and see argosies laden with the necessities of war pass into ports of dispatch for Germany. As these facts became known there was a public agitation, and Mr. Asquith promised to tighten up the blockade. There ensued the tightening-up period, which has been going on ever since. Whenever a question was asked on the subject, we were told that the blockade had been tightened up still farther. So the public was told. But what was the truth? The truth was that Holland, Denmark and Scandinavia were aliowed to drive an enormous trade in foodstuffs, imported in order to feed Germany. In 1916 Holland had practically ceased to send food to the United Kingdom, and had diverted it almost all to Germany. Denmark sent us only about half her pre-war export, and sent Ger

many far more than the balanceSweden also sent large supplies, and Sweden also sent steel in enormous quantities, allowing us only a small proportion.

Such was the situation up to the time that the United States entered the war. We were frequently told that the United States were the only obstacle to a very much stricter blockade. But this was not true. For as a matter of fact a very large part of the feeding stuffs which were imported by Holland and Denmark, to be converted into fats for Germany, did not come from the United States at all, but from the British Empire and from Asia. Thus, for example, the East Asiatic Line of steamers, which is directed by a Dane called Andersen, imported vast quantities of such commodities as rice and soya beans from the Far East. In soya beans alone the East Asiatic Company imported to the amount of 150 per cent above pre-war imports, and we understand that these soya beans were made into oil-cake for cattle, which were fattened for German consumption, and soup tabloids for the German troops. Furthermore, the Foreign Office had come to certain agreements with Denmark and Holland. These agreements bound us to allow the Danes and Dutch to import certain commodities, but gave us no assurance of getting anything substantial in return. Nor did they give us any real control over either Dutch or Danish policy. Such was the situation when the United States entered the war. It is obvious that America can prevent Dutch and Danish vessels from

carrying her produce to their ports for German consumption, but cannot interfere with their trade as far as the British Empire, and probably even the Far East, are concerned. And the question we desire to ask is-Are these neutral countries still importing feeding stuffs and grain from the Far East and the British Empire? We ask this question because we are informed upon excellent authority that only a few weeks ago a cargo of 1500 tons of grain consigned to no one and bound for Holland was sent in to one of our ports by our Navy and was released.

The Grand Fleet is being criticised for doing nothing. The Grand Fleet has not been allowed to blockade Germany. The politicians have taken this vital matter out of the sailors' hands, and for some mysterious reason which has never been divulged they have allowed and even assisted the neutrals to feed Germany. We repeat-and we have the best reason for saying-that if the blockade had been steadily enforced the war would have been over a year ago. We repeat also that fear of the United States or of the neutrals had nothing to do with the failure of the blockade, because Germany was being supplied by means of foodstuffs which came largely from the British Empire and the Far East. The blockade was the natural offensive of the Grand Fleet. If the Grand Fleet has so far failed, it is because the politicians have not allowed the Grand Fleet to carry on this offensive. The blockade -with Mr. Churchill's sanction-was The London Post.

taken out of the hands of the Admiralty early in the war, and is now in the hands of a department of the Foreign Office. We cannot explain why this department has failed in its duty. We have shown that it could not be out of any fear of the United States. We suggest the true reason lies elsewhere. It may partly be due to the humanitarianism of Viscount Grey and his school at the Foreign Office. Lord Robert Cecil is probably also a humanitarian. It is possible that both he and Viscount Grey believe it to be their duty not to starve out Germany, even although Germany is starving us out. They may have thought it their duty to render the British Navy of no avail and leave unused the weapon which has always given us victory in the past. They may have thought it their duty to risk the defeat of the Allies in order to satisfy their own humanitarian ideas of war. We say that If it is, why

may be the explanation. is it not placed fairly and squarely before the British nation? Surely, the nation has some right to decide whether the money it has spent on the Navy and all the lives and money it has spent and is spending on the war should be wasted in order to satisfy the humanitarian scruples of people like Viscount Grey and Lord Robert Cecil. whatever the reason, do not let us accuse our sailors of failing to defeat Germany when they have been prevented by our own Government from using the best means for the defeat of Germany.

But,

What the working classes think is now a matter of great and growing importance to the future of mankind; and in order to understand what they

*The Town Laborer," 1760-1832. By J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond. (Longmans.) 10s. 6d.

think, it is necessary to recall the conditions under which their forbears wrought and thought. No one can understand the hereditary distrust of "Capitalists" and of Governments, which still is deeply engrained in the

minds of our working classes, who does not remember that the workmen and workwomen of today are the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the forlorn abandoned infants who, a hundred years ago, worked from 12 to 16 hours a day in English mills and factories and mines. The Industrial Revolution was to a distressingly large extent based upon the labor of wretched children of from five to twelve years old, untaught, beaten, driven to the limits of human endurance. From what they suffered have sprung Factory Acts, trade union privileges, and free education, and the ever-growing social conscience. But the tradition of those sufferings remains. We reap what our forefathers sowed. And so that an "upper-class" public, wider than that which comprises economic and social students, may know what is known to every educated workman and workwoman by family tradition and by reading, it is well that books such as this should be written.

Mr. and Mrs. Hammond have brilliantly carried through the task which they set to themselves. They give us a clearly etched picture, a terrible picture, of the price in human suffering which the people of England have paid for their progress towards industrial supremacy. They show us a society in which the whole force of money, of religion, of law, of Parliament, of municipal and national administration was directed towards crushing the aspirations towards citizenship of the mass of the people. A small class was set upon defending its own class, and that of a larger expanding manufacturing class, against the unpropertied masses which comprised ninetenths of our people. The terror of the French Revolution was upon those who governed. "The Industrial Revolution," as our authors say, "found England in the hands of an oligarchy, and of an oligarchy so free from mis

giving about its capacity for government that it resented even the smallest abatement of its control. The new industry increased human power to a remarkable degree, and it seemed to this oligarchy the most natural thing in the world that the economic should resemble the political structure, and that in the mill, as in the State, all this power should be concentrated in the hands of a few men who were to act and think for the rest." So it happened that successive governments placed an untrammeled power over their workpeople-men, women, and children-in the hands of employers, refused to workers any right of combination, and when they passed weak tentative Acts to regulate factories, or to prohibit payment of wages in goods ("Truck"), placed the administration in the hands of local justices, who were themselves employers, or were closely associated with employers. "The upper classes allowed no values to the workpeople but those which the slaveowner appreciates in the slave." One shrinks from using lightly the word "slave," but no one can study the industrial period covered by this book and question its appropriateness to describe the status of the workers. Religious organizations found it their mission to offer to the downtrodden people the prospects of happiness in the next world as ample compensation for misery in this one. Men like Wilberforce, on fire to redress the wrongs of slaves in the West Indies, were ruthless opponents in Parliament of the most mild attempts to give to workpeople at home the right of combination. In fact, the early attempts at factory legislation to protect children, and to allow workmen to combine with one another in defense of their labor, were often supported by enlightened manufacturers and as often bitterly opposed by politicians and religious leaders. The Sir Robert Peel

who passed the first Factory Act in 1802-it became a dead letter immediately-was a manufacturer who had grown rich upon the wretchedness of his workpeople. He did his best to bring forth some fruits of repentance. But Lord Melbourne, whose paternal kindness towards the young Queen Victoria was undoubtedly sincere, worked children in his mines from 6 o'clock in the morning till 8 o'clock at night. The English Government was in the hands of men who regarded the idea of citizenship for workmen as a challenge to their religion and their civilization. Law and order in their eyes were impossible unless the working classes could be kept in ignorance and in permanent subjection.

It would do good to those who complain about the "Unrest of Labor" during the present war to compare the patriotic freedom of the working classes now with their repression during the Napoleonic struggle of our grandfathers. Then the governing, manufacturing, and farming classes fought Napoleon with one hand and dragooned the mass of their fellow-countrymen with the other. Patriotism was a class perquisite, and one which brought great wealth to the few who battened upon it. It was assumed as axiomatic that the workpeople would revolt if given an opportunity; public meetings, any kind of public discussion except among the favored classes, were forbidden. This is a national war; ninetenths of the nation were shut out of any interest in the Napoleonic Wars. It was their privilege to be driven by starvation into the Army or to be pressed by force into the Navy, on behalf of a cause of which they knew little or nothing, and concerning which inquiry on their part would have been an impertinence.

The most dreadful feature of a dreadful time was the ruthless exploitation of child labor. The cotton

trade of Lancashire was founded upon it. First, when the power for the mills was derived from country streams, the children were drafted from workhouses and set to labor from the ages of four or five years upwards. Then, when the age of steam began, and factories were set up in towns, the workmen and women, who had refused to send their children to work in the country, were compelled by lack of employment themselves to drive them into town factories. The children were the breadwinners in many households. Towns which, in the days before the coming of factories had been the expression of a free civic life, put forth unlovely suburbs of mean streets and became little better than industrial barracks. The worship of wealth as an end in itself left no room for feelings of humanity. Had the Industrial Revolution been guided and controlled by Parliaments with imaginative vision much of the misery and ugliness might have been avoided. But Parliament, representing a few well-to-do classes, admired the fierce energy which created industrial England for just those features which now we most deplore. It was admired not because it had created a society of free men, but because it had created a society in which SO few men were free.

Political reform came to England much earlier than Industrial Reform. The first Reform Bill of 1832, born of industrial unrest, brought political power not to the working class, but to what the French call La Bourgeoisie. It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that our governing classes learned that a strong country cannot be built up on the privileges of the few and the repression of the many. It is little more than 30 years since the working classes generally were enfranchised, and then the competition of political parties for the working

man's vote gave us our modern social legislation. We cannot expect the working classes to forget what their fathers and their grandfathers-worse still, what their mothers and their grandmothers-suffered in the black days not so very long past. We should rather feel respect, even admiration, The Economist.

for their patriotic sacrifices in the present war. Among the lessons of the war one has stood out every day during the past three years: that if our working classes had not, at great price, won for themselves freedom this country would speedily have collapsed under the stress of war.

Earnestness, consecration and a combination of high ideals with practical good sense characterize the eight brief discourses which make up Dean George Hodges' little volume on "Religion in a World at War" (The Macmillan Co.) The book is not written for theologians, but for average people. Its teaching is clear and incisive; and it closes on a note of triumph, with the assurance: "This we know, that the word of Jesus Christ shall be fulfilled again, as in a thousand wars of old, and out of this evil shall come good." All of the discourses are inspiring-none more SO than that on "All Saints' Day in a World at War."

"Pilgrims into Folly," by Wallace Irwin, widely known as the author of "Letters to a Japanese Schoolboy," is a collection of short stories, all characterized by a strain of romance, and all uncommonly attractive and well worth reading. The central figure of "Wings" is a rich girl in love with her violin-teacher; of "He Shot the Bird of Paradise," an actor whose imaginative power, if his prospective manager can be assured of it, will draw him a seventy-five-thousanddollar salary; of "The Highest," an aviator. In "What Became of Deegan Folk?" and "You Can't Get Away from Your Grandfather," the question of heredity is raised. "The Torpedo" pictures a German spy in London,

and the hero of "The Ideal Gentleman" is a head-waiter. There is humor, pathos, worldly wisdom and knowledge of human nature in them all, and their variety makes the volume a particularly delightful one to take up at odd moments or to read aloud. George H. Doran Co.

The

"Dave Porter," whose adventures Edward Stratemeyer has described, season after season, for the enjoyment of boy readers, reappears this autumn in the thirteenth volume of the series entitled "Dave Porter's Great Search" (Lothrop, Lee & Shepard Co.) "great search" referred to is that in which Dave Porter and his friend, Roger Morr, engaged, in pursuit of two girls who had been kidnapped by gypsies. Of course, everything turns out as it should in the last chapters, but in the meantime many exciting things happen. To another rapidly-lengthening series, designed for young girl readers, the same publishers add "Plucky Little Patsy," by Nina Rhoades, the story of a small damsel whom a sudden turn of fortune carries from a New York flat to life as an heiress in an English manor-house, and who passes through her new experiences alert and unspoiled. The picture on the "jacket," which shows her, with her small hand-bag, confronting an impressive English butler, gives a clue to the plot. Both books are illustrated.