174 BRITAIN FOR THE BRITON 



quarters per acre; and instead of 8,500,000 of acres being 

 necessary to produce all the wheat we require for our consump- 

 tion, 7,000,000 would suffice. 



We can Gkow all our Food Supplies 



Then we import over 6,000,000 cwts. of bacon. Can any 

 man in his senses affirm that if we grow from 7,000,000 to 

 8,500,000 acres of wheat, with thousands of farmsteads scattered 

 throughout the country, we should lack any one of the required 

 facilities for producing every pound of bacon that we now 

 import in such vast quantities ? 



Next we come to cheese, butter, poultry, and eggs. Who or 

 what is to stop us producing all these when once the great land 

 industry is permanently established in our midst ? 



Once we give back to the people their best heritage — agri- 

 culture — put the plough back into the furrow, convert our 

 sheep-walks into cornfields, our deer forests and sporting estates 

 into market gardens ; pasture our sheep on the rough hill-sides 

 (their natural demesnes) instead of on our best arable land, and 

 our cows in our low-lying water meadows, and then supplement 

 this by stall feeding as they do in other countries where they 

 raise a larger head of cattle per acre than we do ; rigorously stop 

 the wasteful system of allowing these animals to fatten on the 

 cream of the land which should rightly be regarded as the pro- 

 perty and substance of the people : who shall say that these 

 things shall not be ? 



They are impossible to-day because the blundering of 

 Governments, the insincerity of politicians, and the ignorance 

 of the people have made them impossible, but go and ask any 

 other civilised country in the world if they have found it impos- 

 sible to accomplish these things, and they will laugh in your 

 face. 



Comparison with Belgium 



Take one concrete example : Belgium, for instance, sends us 

 of the surplus of her farm produce. We get £1,229,000 worth 

 of eggs alone from that country, annually, besides which Belgium 

 sends us largely of her other agricultural products, while retain- 

 ing, at the same time, a sufficiency for her own consumption. 

 But the astonishing fact in Belgium's case is that she manages 

 to achieve this remarkable feat in spite of the fact that her area 

 is more densely populated than almost any country in Europe, 

 carrying, as it does, about 630 head of the population to the 

 square mile, or nearly double that of the United Kingdom, 

 which is about 360 to the square mile. 



