This, however, was only a minor field of the Blight’s reactions. With the probable failure of the home crop looming before him, even the man in the street could not fail to perceive the more obvious results. It meant a greater dependence upon imported food-stuffs and especially imported grain. Argentina, Canada, India and the United States must make up the missing supplies; and since almost half our cereals were home-grown at that period, the price of food was certain to rise by leaps and bounds; so that every family in the land would be affected by the catastrophe. Then a further factor was brought to light. With the failure of grain and even of grass, it would be impossible to keep alive the cattle which furnished part of the nation’s food. The milk supply would be gravely affected also, from the same cause. It is difficult for us now to look back and catch again the spirit of that time. Never before, even during the war, had the food of Britain been endangered to such a degree. And the steadily rising prices were sufficient to bring home to the most thoughtless the actual imminence of the peril. I can recall, however, that at first there was no panic of any kind. It was assumed by all of us that although we might have to go short of our usual lavish supplies, yet we should always have enough food to carry us through to the next harvest. The whole world was our granary; and if we were prepared to pay the higher prices which we saw to be inevitable, we had no reason to suppose that we should lack imported grain. Our attitude was quite comprehensible under the circumstances, I think. In the past we had always been able to obtain food; and there seemed no doubt that the same would hold good through this shortage. The newspapers were fairly evenly divided in their expressed opinions. The Government had recently adjourned Parliament, after a session in which their majority had oscillated dangerously more than once, and the Opposition Press seized upon the Blight in order to embarrass the Cabinet, and especially the Prime Minister, as far as possible. They clamoured that the Government should take steps to secure the food supply of the country by making immediate purchases of wheat in the foreign markets. They demanded that a system of rationing should be established forthwith; and that cases of food-hoarding should be stringently punished. Day after day they held up to public obloquy the individual members of the Cabinet, who were then scattered on holiday; the amusements of each of them were described and coupled with sneering hopes that they would succeed better in their games than they had done in the government of the country and the safeguarding of the national interests. Echoes of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate scandal were kept alive in the most ingenious manner.