Britain's situation is now absurdly weak, without and within. And its weakness is due to one main cause--_the fact that we do not grow our own food_. To get the better of submarines in this war will make no difference to our future situation. A little peaceful study and development of submarines and aircraft will antiquate our present antidotes. You cannot chain air and the deeps to war uses and think you have done with their devilish possibilities a score of years afterwards because for the moment the submarine menace or the air menace is "well in hand." At the end of the war I suppose the Channel Tunnel will be made. And quite time too! But even that will not help us. We get no food from Europe, and never shall again. Not even by linking ourselves to Europe can we place ourselves in security from Europe. Faith may remove mountains, but it will not remove Britain to the centre of the Atlantic. Here we shall remain, every year nearer and more accessible to secret and deadly attack. The next war, if there be one--which Man forbid--may be fought without the use of a single big ship or a single infantryman. It may begin, instead of ending, by being a war of starvation; it may start, as it were, where it leaves off this time. And the only way of making even reasonably safe is to grow our own food. If for years to come we have to supplement by State granaries, they must be placed underground; not even there will they be too secure. Unless we grow our own food after this war we shall be the only great country which does not, and a constant temptation to any foe. To be self-sufficing will be the first precaution taken by our present enemies, in order that blockade may no longer be a weapon in our hands, so far as _their_ necessary food is concerned. Whatever arrangements the world makes after the war to control the conduct of nations in the future, the internal activities of those nations will remain unfettered, capable of deadly shaping and plausible disguise in the hands of able and damnable schemers. The submarine menace of the present is merely awkward, and no doubt surmountable--it is nothing to the submarine-_cum_-air menace of peace time a few years hence. _It will be impossible to guard against surprise under the new conditions._ If we do not grow our own food, we could be knocked out of time in the first round. But besides the danger from overseas, we have an inland danger to our future just as formidable--the desertion of our countryside and the town-blight which is its corollary. Despair seizes on one reading that we should cope with the danger of the future by new cottages, better instruction to farmers, better kinds of manure and seed, encouragement to co-operative societies, a cheerful spirit, and the storage of two to three years' supply of grain. Excellent and necessary, in their small ways--they are a mere stone to the bread we need.