to make more imperative the necessity for the home 

 , farmer to produce more food stuffs.. 



" It is all very well to talk about producing more food 

 .stuffs," you may answer me, " but how are we to do it? 

 :We also suffer from scarcity or high prices in the supply 

 of raw materials of our industry. One-eighth of the 

 horse supply of Ireland has become military fuel. Agri- 

 cultural labour has also gone to the front, largely 

 through recruiting or the calling up of reservists. The 

 fertilisers we use are more expensive, so are seeds, so 

 .-are feeding stuffs. Even granting that we might pro- 

 cure the seeds, the fertilisers and the feeding stuffs, how 

 is an increase in tillage and food production to be com- 

 bined with a shortage in labour and in horses for agri- 

 cultural work? You are asking of us impossibilities. 

 . We who tilled before worked hard enough, and you 

 now ask us to slave." I might answer that I know 

 that you are human and brotherly-hearted enough to 

 other human beings actually to slave to relieve them if 

 the hungry or starving people were in your own parish, 

 visible to your eyes, and were actually dependent, to 

 your own knowledge, for food on you and you alone. 

 Slave, of course, in that case you would. I am trying to 

 lend you glasses to make you see things at a distance 

 as if they were close. You may know that already the 

 cost of living for workers in the towns has gone up 

 twenty-five per cent. That is, the wage of the worker 

 who has twenty shillings a week at the present time 

 can only procure food and coal and other necessaries to 

 the amount which fifteen shillings would have purchased 

 before the war. It is practically equivalent to a drop 

 of five shillings a week in the income of such a house- 

 hold. That is, somehow, food or heat or light must be 

 restricted in the family to the extent of five shillings a 

 week. The threatened blockade if effective to any de- 

 gree, actually or morally, will knock some more shil- 

 lings off such incomes weekly ; and through it all will 

 .be going on the exhaustion of the last harvest of the 





