ADDRESS. O 



wheat would be contraband, as if it were cannon or powder, liable to 

 capture even luider a neutral Hag. We must therefore accept tlie situation 

 and treat wheat as munitions of war, and grow, accumulate, or store it as 

 such. It has been shown that at the best our stock of wheat and Hour 

 amounts only to 04,000,000 bushels — fourteen weeks' supply — while last 

 April our stock was equal to only 10,000,000 bushels, the smallest ever 

 recorded by ' Beerbohm ' for the period of the season. Similarly, the 

 stocks held in Europe, the United States, and Canada, called ' the world's 

 visible supply,' amounted to only 54,000,000 bushels, or 10,000,000 less 

 than last year's sum total, and nearly 82,000,000 less than that of 1893 

 or 1894 at the corresponding period. To arrest this impending clanger, it 

 has been proposed that an amount of 04,000,000 bushels of wheat should 

 be purchased by the State and stored in national granaries, not to be 

 opened, except to remedy deterioration of grain, or in view of national 

 disaster rendering starvation imminent. This 04,000,000 bushels would 

 add another fourteen weeks" life to the population ; assuming that the 

 ordinary stock had not been drawn on, the wheat in the country would 

 only then be enough to feed the population for twenty-eight weeks. 



I do not venture to speak authoritatively on national granaries. The 

 subject has been discussed in the daily press, and the recently published 

 Report from the Agricultural Committee on NationalAVheat Stores brings 

 together all the arguments in favour of this important scheme, together 

 with the difficulties to be faced if it be carried out with necessary com- 

 pleteness. 



More hopeful, although difficult and costly, would be tlie alternative 

 of growing most, if not all our own wheat supply here at liome in the 

 British Isles. The average yield over the United Kingdom last year was 

 29-07 bushels per acre, the average for the last eleven years being 29-46. 

 For twelve months we need 240,000,000 bushels of wheat, requiring about 

 8,250,000 acres of good wheat-growing land, or nearly 13,000 square 

 miles, increasing at the rate of 100 square miles per annum, to render us 

 self-supporting as to bread food. This area is about one-fourth the size 

 of England.' 



A total area of land in the United Kingdom equal to a plot 110 

 miles square, of quality and climate sufficient to grow wheat to the 

 extent of 29 bushels per acre, does not seem a hopeless demand.- It is 

 doubtful, however, if this amount of land could be kept under wheat, 

 and the necessary expense of high farming faced, except under 

 the imperious pressure of impending starvation, or the stimulus of a 

 national subsidy or permanent high prices. Certainly these 13,000 square 

 miles would not be available under ordinary economic conditions, for 

 much, perhaps all, the land now under barley and oats would not be 



- Tlie total area of the United Kingdom is 120,979 square miles; therefore the 

 required land is about a tenth part of the total. 



