128 THE MURDER OF AGRICULTURE 



annually, and which we ask foreign nations to grow for us, 

 can he produced in our own country. 



Broadly speaking, it suffices to say that when a nation 

 takes the insane, suicidal policy of killing her own in- 

 dustries, throwing her own people out of employment, 

 and forcing the best of them to emigrate to save them 

 from starvation, she does that which, in the process of 

 time, will ensure her own destruction as surely as the 

 seasons come round. 

 Construe- Strength lies in constructiveness and in conservation, 



tlV6n6SS 



and Con- and the country which adopts a destructive and waste- 

 «ervatism j^^j^ policy of economics is bound to lose its national 

 vigour. 



England is in this position to-day; her great land in- 

 dustries have decayed to an extent that she has actually 

 become dependent upon any and every country which 

 will come to her assistance with the bare necessaries of 

 life; she is obliged to send her own sons and daughters 

 away from her shores every year in ever-increasing 

 numbers because she can no longer support them, and 

 she has literally and truly become dependent upon the 

 good will of foreign countries for her daily bread. 



Now this particular phase of the case alone opens up 

 so vast a field of discussion that we have only room to 

 refer to one or two of its aspects. 



It is said that as long as we hold the seas all fear of 

 our food supplies being cut off may be dismissed. This 

 may be true; and the absence of a really formidable 

 European naval power during the last half-century has 

 been the justification for such a belief. But the past is 

 past; the present exhibits new and alarming aspects of 



