'A system of international credit--founded necessarily on British credit--is as great a necessity for ourselves as it is for Central Europe. We must finance our customers or lose them and share their ruin, sinking deeper every month into the morass of doles and relief works. That is the main lesson of the present crisis.'--(Jan. 1st, 1921.) [2] Out of a population of 45,000,000 our home-grown wheat suffices for only about 12,500,000, on the basis of the 1919-20 crop. Sir Henry Rew, _Food Supplies in Peace and War_, says: 'On the basis of our present population ... we should still need to import 78 per cent. of our requirements.' (p. 165). Before the War, according to the same authority, home produce supplied 48 per cent. in food value of the total consumption, but the table on which this figure is based does not include sugar, tea, coffee, or cocoa. [3] The growing power of the food-producing area and its determination to be independent as far as possible of the industrial centre, is a fact too often neglected in considering the revolutionary movements of Europe. The war of the classes almost everywhere is crossed by another war, that between cities and country. The land-owning countryman, whether peasant or noble, tends to become conservative, clerical, anti-socialist (and anti-social) in his politics and outlook. [4] 'The Economic Consequences of the Peace,' pp. 275-277. [5] _Manchester Guardian_, Weekly Edition, February 6th., 1920. [6] _Daily News_, June 28th., 1920. [7] Sir William Goode, British Director of Relief, has said, (_Times_ Dec. 6th., 1919):-- 'I have myself recently returned from Vienna. I feel as if I had spent ten days in the cell of a condemned murderer who has given up all hope of reprieve. I stayed at the best hotel, but I saw no milk and no eggs the whole time I was there. In the bitter, cold hall of the hotel, once the gayest rendezvous in Europe, the visitors huddled together in the gloom of one light where there used to be forty. They were more like shadows of the Embankment than representatives of the rich. Vienna's world-famous Opera House is packed every afternoon. Why? Women and men go there in order to keep themselves warm, and because they have no work to do.' He went on:-- 'First aid was to hasten peace. Political difficulties combined with decreased production, demoralisation of railway traffic, to say nothing of actual shortages of coal, food, and finance, had practically paralysed industrial and commercial activity. The bold liberation or creation of areas, without simultaneous steps to reorganise economic life, had so far proved to be a dangerous experiment. Professor Masaryk, the able President of Czecho-Slovakia, put the case in a nutshell when he said: "It is a question of the export of merchandise or of population."' [8] The figures for 1913 are:--