THE POLICY OF GUARANTEED PRICES 71 



were grudgingly paid 36s. 6d. a week, including 

 all allowances ? 



I do not wish to stress the fact of barley 

 having a free market ; barley, relatively speak- 

 ing, was a small matter. The reasons were 

 psychological rather than physical. After the 

 signing of the Armistice the farmers sulked, 

 and not only sulked, but were possessed by the 

 feeling of insecurity, both as to the tenuous hold 

 they had on the land with their annual leases, 

 and as to the fear of falling prices. They 

 naturally resented American farmers being paid 

 any price from 100s. to 150s. per qr., whilst 

 English farmers were only allowed 75s. per 

 qr. Farms were being sold over the heads of 

 the tenants — and, in spite of Mr. Cautley's little 

 Bill, continued to be sold — until in some 

 counties, in 19 19, half the land was said to 

 have changed owners. There was the fear, 

 too, fanned by official prophets like Sir 

 James Wilson, that the price of wheat would 

 fall to a low figure. Not realising the mili- 

 tarist ambitions of the Government bent on 

 adventures in Russia and Mesopotamia, and 

 with imaginations fed by stories of granaries 

 bursting with grain on the seaboard of the 

 Argentine prairies, on the quays of Odessa, 

 waiting for the opening of the golden gates of 

 Constantinople, and of the luxuriant crops 

 growing on the fertile plains watered by the 

 Euphrates and the Tigris, farmers undoubtedly 



