"If I manage it," she repeated, "you shall know of it, and you shall make your self-denial complete and efficacious."

"I don't like the way in which this sentence is turning out."

"You shall have a pot in front of you at breakfast, and you shan't touch a shred of it."

"Francesca," I said, "you're a tyrant. But no, you wouldn't be mean enough to do it-before the children too."

"Perhaps, as a concession, I would allow you a little marmalade in a pudding at luncheon."

"But I don't like marmalade in a Punch.

pudding at luncheon. I like it on toast at breakfast."

"But you're not going to have it on toast at breakfast."

"Well," I said, "I shall conduct reprisals. For every time you don't allow me to have any I shall destroy something you like a blouse or a hat. If I'm to give up the essence of Dundee or Paisley you shall at least give up hats."

"But the marmalade will remain." "Yes, and the hats will all perish. That's where I come in."

"Don't buoy yourself up with that notion," she said. "You'll have to pay for the new ones-or owe."

R. C. Lehmann.

What is beginning very seriously to trouble the statesmen of every country, neutrals no less than belligerents, and to add to their more pressing perplexities, is the practical certainty of there being, for some time after the war, the gravest worldshortage, not only in the principal foodstuffs, but also in the most indispensable raw materials. In spite of frantic efforts to maintain and to increase production, the aggregate wheat harvests of the world have been year by year falling behind the demands of the growing populations. Though supplies are held up temporarily in this country and that for lack of the means of conveyance, the aggregate world stock is rapidly shrinking. Though the number of cattle, sheep and pigs has been so far maintained in some countries, it is believed to have been greatly reduced throughout all Continental Europe. The markets of the world are being swept bare of all the subsidiary foodstuffs. All the efforts at economy, voluntary and enforced, do not suffice

to counterbalance the increased consumption and waste incident on transforming some thirty millions of peasants and laborers into soldiers, who must be maintained in fighting energy; and on engaging perhaps fifteen million other men and women at en

hanced wages on the manufacture of munitions. For one or other reason, it is to be expected that Russia, Roumania and Hungary, and to a large extent even the United States, will, for the next year or two, drop out of the list of food-exporting countries. What is no less serious is that the shortage will extend to most of the raw materials needed for "reconstruction" and for the resumption of manufacturing production, on which the forty or fifty millions of workers throughout the world now in arms or engaged in "war trades"-numbering, with their dependents, possibly one in twelve of the entire population of the globe-will depend for subsistence when the Declaration of Peace gives the signal for demobilization. What has increased during the war has been

the production of steel. But the aggregate output of coal has largely diminished, together with that of most of the metallic ores. There will be the gravest shortage of oil and timber and hides and wool. This general world shortage of the principal commodities will be enormously aggravated by the shortage of shipping. The aggregate merchant shipping tonnage of the world may, at the end of the war, probably stand at not much more than two-thirds of the pre-war figure, whilst of that which survives a large proportion will be required for a year or two to carry the millions of soldiers home. To aggravate the difficulty, all the railways and roads of Europe will be in a terrible state of disrepair; and land transport will everywhere be slow, uncertain and extremely costly. It is not merely that the world is dependent for a sufficiency of food on the successive harvests in its different countries during the next twelve or eighteen months being relatively good. statesmen's difficulties will, it is true, be intensified if there should be any widespread failure of crops, such as might be produced by drought in Australia or floods in China, the spread of the potato disease throughout Europe, or a bad monsoon in India. But the famine into which the world is hurrying will be even more of a money-famine than a food-famine.

The

Over large parts of Europe the resumption of manufacturing production will be for a long time impracticable-even the restoration of the destroyed factories and machinery will be difficult-owing to the lack of raw material and fuel. Whilst prices will be fabulously high, there will be no wages. Unless some very drastic and very far-reaching measures are taken in time, and taken on a sufficiently large scale, there will be many millions of families in parts of Europe

and Southeastern Asia without employment and without means to buy the scanty supplies of extremely dear food that will be locally accessible to them. There will be labor revolts and revolutionary upheavals. Whole districts will be starving. It is not too much to say that there will be places within a day's journey of European capitals where society, from an extremity of want not paralleled in Europe since the Thirty Years' War, may be near dissolution.

It is this prospective result of diverting forty or fifty millions of European workers, during three or four years, from production to destruction that has caused all the schemes for "Trade after the War" to shrivel up, and taken the life out of both the Paris Economic Conference resolutions and the "pre-emption" projects of the Central Powers. What the statesmen are beginning to realize is that the world after the war, so far as the exportable surpluses of foodstuffs and raw materials are concerned, will be in the position of a beleagured city. There will not be enough to go round. It will be plainly impossible to revert, for some time to come, to the unfettered scramble of private enterprise that we call Free Trade. No government, belligerent or neutral, will feel able, the morning after Peace has been declared, to dispense with the extensive controls that it has had to exercise over importing, exporting, manufacturing and distributing. No nation will be inclined, whatever may be the prices offered by others in more desperate need, to allow the export of any commodity of which it may presently run short. On the other hand, every nation will be eager to increase its own exports, and therefore obtain for this purpose materials and coal, in order both to employ its demobilized millions and to pay for the imports of

which it will stand in such sore need.

What policy of International Trade does this impending world-shortage indicate? Half a century ago the orthodox economists would have blindly relied on the "Law of Supply and Demand"; they would have said that where there was most scarcity prices would rise highest, and supplies would flow automatically whither they were most required. Within each country the available commodities would similarly go to those who were willing to pay the highest prices for them, and must therefore be presumed to have the greatest need of them! Upon this argument food continued to be exported from Ireland throughout the Great Famine because the starving Irish could not compete in "effective demand" with the London diners-out. The economists now know better; and they are adv sing their governments that if in the impending worldshortage, distribution, either between nations or within each nation, is left to the "free play of economic forces," it will mean famine on a large scale. The richer nations, the richer classes within each nation, the richest family within each class, may thus be fully suplied, at no greater inconvenience than increased payment. But the poorer nations, classes and families will be starved. What might be, as in a beleaguered city, no worse than a general abstinence, if systematic distribution is arranged, will be converted, if "let alone," into a famine so extensive as possibly to bring down society in ruin.

It is significant of the change which has come over both economics and politics that it is to the Labor and Socialist Parties that the world is indebted for calling attention to this impending peril; and that it is under their pressure that the heavily burdened governments are beginning to give the subject consideration. It

remains to be seen whether the statesmanship of the present governing classes of Europe can rise to the height of the task that they have brought upon themselves. The shortage will probably be sufficiently great to demand that, as in a beleaguered city, the whole world should be placed on nations. This, so far as some of the principal food-producing countries are concerned (such, for instance, as the South American Republics, India and China), we have no machinery to secure. But what could be established, and what in spite of the strenuous opposition of the merchants and shipowners certainly ought to be established-for the peril is imminent and unmistakable-is an international control of the whole export trade in the commodities of which we shall be short, and of the whole marine transportation that will be required. What may, we hope, be expected is some extension and transformation of the Commission Internationale de Ravitailement that the Allied Governments have found it necessary to set up in order to coordinate their own international dealings; the admission to this (possibly under the management of the Council of the League of Nations--or whatever may be the title of the Supernational Authority in which this war must issue), not only of all the countries lately belligerent, but also of the neutrals; the control by this Commission of all export trade between nations (reserving to each its own coastwise and colonial trade), and of all beyond each nation's indispensable quota of merchant shipping; and the deliberate allocation and conveyance to each country, out of the aggregate exportable surpluses, of whatever is required to supply the most urgent primary needs of all of them, before the less urgent demands of any one among them are satisfied, whatever may be

the pecuniary inducements that may be offered to the contrary. Europe, in short, will have to be fed, whoever pays for it, on the same principle that Belgium has been fed; though the grip at her throat will be no longer that of the Germans but that of a worldshortage. And within each nation, the same principle of "priority of need," irrespective of "effective demand," will have to be enforced. In this country, for instance, we shall apparently be short, for months and even years, not only of wheat and meat, but also of timber, bricks, building stone, builder's ironwork and components of ships and houses (except steel). It is clear that we shall not be able to restore our railways and factories, our schools and roads, let alone The New Statesman.

all

build the million new cottages that the demobilized Army will need to return to, if the all too scanty building materials and building trades workmen are competed for by by millionaires wanting new palaces, speculative capitalists eager to put up new hotels and theatres, or financiers anxious to make money by investing their capital in new constructional works abroad. The principle of "priority of need," under which practically all supplies are now regulated during war, will plainly have to be continued during peace. The hard facts are compelling the statesmen to see, as the economists have had to recognize, that the world must more and more be administered according to the homely axiom of "No cake for anyone until all have bread "

'Oo seen 'er off?

"Me," says the tide,

"I 'ad to, for why, there was no one beside;

For sailor folks' women, they're busy enough

'Thout 'angin' round pier 'eads to see their chaps off.

The gulls all about 'er they wrangled

an' cried,

An' I seen 'er off," says the Liverpool tide.

'Oo waved 'er good-bye? .

"Me," says old Tuskar, "When the sun it went down an' the

light it got dusker,

(With a sea gettin' up an' a wind blowin' keen),

An' the smoke of 'er funnels could

'ardly be seen,

An' the last of the sunset was red in

the sky

With the first o' my flashes I waved 'er good-bye."

'Oo seen 'er sunk?

"Me," says the sun,

"At the top o' my climbin' I seen the thing done;

I seen 'er 'eave to, an' I seen 'er 'ull quiver,

Settle an' stumble an' treble an' shiver,

An' her stern it went up an' 'er bow it went down,

An' most of 'er people, they just 'ad to drown,

An' I 'adn't a cloud for to shut out the

sight,

So I seen 'er sink," says the sun in 'is might.

'Oo seen the last of 'er?

"Us," says the crew,

All that was left out o' twenty-an'-two, "We seen the last of 'er (floating around On a bottom-up boat among dead 'uns an' drowned),

We seen 'er waterways runnin' with blood,

We seen poor mates of ours shot where they stood...

But them chaps as done it, I tell you now true

The London Chronicle.

They ain't seen the last of us yet," says the crew,

"No you bet your sweet life," says what's left of the crew!

C. Fox Smith.

Margaret Skinnider's "Doing My Bit for Ireland" (The Century Co.) is an account of the Sinn Fein rising in Dublin at Easter, 1916, written by one who was intimately associated with the leaders of the outbreak, and took part herself, clad in a man's uniform, in the fighting. It is a graphic narrative,-the first detailed and authoritative account which has been written, from the Irish point of view, of the motives and hopes which inspired the rising, of the preparations which were made for it, of the leaders who risked everything to make it successful, of the desperate street fighting, and of the fate of the chief conspirators. Among the dozen illustrations are two portraits of the author, one in normal dress and the other in boy's clothes.

It can hardly be necessary to bespeak a welcome for a second series of papers and sketches by "A Student in Arms" (E. P. Dutton & Co.). The first series, with their intimate disclosure of the author's personality and of his relations with his comrades in the trenches and of the courage and devotion of the men who have fought and died for England in the great war, touched the hearts of readers on both sides of the sea as few books of the war have done. This second volume contains a dozen or more of the author's sketches and reflections, most of them, like those in the earlier book, reprinted from The Spectator. Readers who would like to know more of the life of the authorDonald Hankey-will be touched by the brief biography of him by his sister,

which serves as an Introduction. Most of the sketches in this volume were actually written in the trenches or near them, with the sounds of battle in his ears, in the months from May, 1916, when he came back to the front, after months in the hospital, where he had gone for the treatment of his wounds, down to October of that year, when, after kneeling in brief prayer with his men, he was killed while leading them "over the top." A striking portrait forms the frontispiece.

"The Mexican Problem," about which Clarence W. Barron, the wellknown financial expert, writes informingly in the volume bearing that title, has been thrust into the background by the exciting events of the great world war; but, although it is less acute than it was a year ago, it still exists and may at any time become menacing. Few Americans feel any pride in the way in which the United States has dealt with itor rather has failed to deal with it. Mr. Barron's treatment of it is from the business and financial point of view, and is based, not only on a long financial experience, but on close personal observation on the ground. The Mexican problem, as he views it, one of business, not of politics, and the solution which he urges is a business solution. He dismisses as fallacies the idea that the land question is at the bottom of the Mexican troubles, and the companion idea that the natural wealth of Mexico has furnished a base for contending