The other alteration, already beginning to be visible though not yet adequately understood, is a change in the value of food. Three causes henceforth will be operating together to make food dear. First, as cities continue to grow and the industrial population of the earth continues to augment faster than the agricultural population, the need to import food will be always greater; second, the exportable surplus of food will be always less because as the agricultural and low-craft nations progress toward their ideal of industrial independence they will consume more and more of their own food products; and third, the supply of those industrial commodities that are exchanged for food will enormously increase. In the language of the economist, the agricultural index will rise and the industrial index will fall. It will require a greater quantity of manufactures to buy a bushel of wheat; fewer bushels of wheat to buy a manufactured article. This will not be for one year or two. It will be lasting. It will affect the status of great groups and classes of people. In the cities and industrial centres the cost of living will move in a vertical manner. The difficulties of food-importing countries may, almost certainly will, become desperate. The people of Great Britain, for example, will pay dearly for the wealth they have amassed by industry in the last seventy-five years. If the value of food, priced in British machine-wares, should double, then for the same quantity of food as before they would have to give twice the quantity of manufactured goods, which would mean twice as much labour and no more to eat. The same difficulties will beset all countries not self-contained in food. They will exhort their people to return to the fields, which the people will be loth to do, having tasted cities. They will expect their governments to make food cheaper by edict, or to buy it out of taxation and distribute it gratis. Moreover, in some countries, taking again the case of Great Britain as notable, there may not be enough land. The people perhaps could not feed themselves no matter how intensively they worked their fields, industry having multiplied the population beyond the utmost potentiality of a native food supply. Obviously indicated is a movement of dispersal together with a limitation upon the increase of industrial population. More power will pass to countries, like the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Australia, that have the advantage of enormous food-reserves. Their problems will be internal.