The menace of the submarine has done this for us, and devastating as its brutal work has been, we may regard it as a blessing in disguise. For we should not need to depend on foreign imports of food if we utilised our own acreage as fully and diligently as we might. Life in the country, work in the country, means health and a light heart; and many there are who would like to see the olden days of purely native production come back again--the days of home spinning, home weaving, home manufacture of every kind carried on in all the towns and villages of rural England. Here and there of late years there have been some efforts in this direction--there is a spinning and weaving school at Haslemere, at Stratford-on-Avon, and elsewhere--but the support given to these praiseworthy industries is not sufficiently certain and prolonged to push them with sufficient prominence into the public notice. Nevertheless, many a woman helps the movement by electing to wear only home-woven goods; they are beautiful and artistic enough to deserve patronage, and can be purchased direct from the weavers and spinners without the intervention of the middle-man whose business is “profiteering.” What an England it might be--what an England it _will_ be--when every acre of suitable soil bears its weight of golden grain!--when every orchard’s value can be appraised by its measure of luscious fruit!--when farmyards are full of cattle, and good wives are so clever at poultry and dairy work that the country can do without “millions of foreign eggs”--having such “millions” of its own--and when prosperous farms in the country are esteemed more valuable possessions than houses in town, where money is often uselessly wasted on so-called “pleasures” which have their end in damaged health and “vexation of spirit”! To my own mind there is nothing more lovely or more satisfying than the life of the country, where one may see the real breadth of the sky, and feel the real freshness of the air. In great cities, where humanity is a mere hive, the houses of brick and stone block out the sky and impede the air, and somehow one imagines that God is a long way off, while in the country He seems “nearer than hands and feet.” Everything speaks of His infinite care and providence--the birds, the flowers, the trees, the murmur of the leaves that clap together like little fairy hands in the wind, and the low, sweet, sigh that sways through the long grass at sunset. The nearer man approaches to Nature, the more he becomes conscious of a Divine, mysterious Presence to which his whole being instinctively, though almost unconsciously, responds as “Our Father.” In the rush and roar of great cities he loses this delicate intimacy with his own origin, and all that is or might be divine in himself becomes lowered to the level of gross material needs and ideas which are the reflex of the coarser atmosphere around him.