The fact has, of course, for generations been the main argument for Britain's right to maintain unquestioned command of the sea. In the discussions before the War concerning the German challenge to our naval power, it was again and again pointed out that Britain's position was very special: what is a matter of life and death for her had no equivalent importance for other powers. And it was when the Kaiser announced that Germany's future was upon the sea that British fear became acute! The instinct of self-preservation became aroused by the thought of the possible possession in hostile hands of an instrument that could sever vital arteries. The fact shows how impossible it is to divide off into watertight compartments the 'economic' from the political or moral. To preserve the capacity to feed our people, to see that our children shall have milk, is certainly an economic affair--a commercial one even. But it is an indispensable condition also of the defence of our country, of the preservation of our national freedom. The ultimate end behind the determination to preserve a preponderant navy may be purely nationalist or moral; the means is the maintenance of a certain economic situation. Indeed the task of ensuring the daily bread of the people touches moral and social issues nearer and more intimate even than the preservation of our national independence. The inexorable rise in the cost of living, the unemployment and loss and insecurity which accompany a rapid fall in prices, are probably the predominating factors in a social unrest which may end in transforming the whole texture of Western society. The worker finds his increased wage continually nullified by increase of price. Out of this situation arises an exasperation which, naturally enough, with peoples habituated by five years of war to violence and emotional mass-judgments, finds expression, not necessarily in organised revolution--that implies, after all, a plan of programme, a hope of a new order--but rather in sullen resentment; declining production, the menace of general chaos. However restricted the resources of a country may have become, there will always be some people under a régime of private capital and individual enterprise who will have more than a mere sufficiency, whose means will reach to luxury and even ostentation. They may be few in number; the amount of waste their luxury represents may in comparison with the total resources be unimportant. But their existence will suffice to give colour to the charge of profiteering and exploitation and to render still more acute the sullen discontent, and finally perhaps the tendency to violence. It is in such a situation that the price of a few prime necessaries--bread, coal, milk, sugar, clothing--becomes a social, political, and moral fact of the first importance. A two-shilling loaf may well be a social and political portent.