We have talked readily enough in the past of this or that being a 'menace to civilisation.' The phrase has been applied indifferently to a host of things from Prussian Militarism to the tango. No particular meaning was attached to the phrase, and we did not believe that the material security of our civilisation--the delivery of the letters and the milk in the morning, and the regular running of the 'Tubes'--would ever be endangered in our times. But this is what has happened in a few months. We have seen one of the greatest and most brilliant capitals of Europe, a city completely untouched by the physical devastation of war, endowed beyond most with the equipment of modern technical learning and industry, with some of the greatest factories, medical schools and hospitals of our times, unable to save its children from death by simple starvation--unable, with all that equipment, to provide them each with a little milk and a few ounces of flour every day. 5 _The Limits of Political Control_ It is sometimes suggested that as political factors (particularly the drawing of frontiers) entered to some extent at least into the present distribution of population, political forces can re-distribute that population. But re-distribution would mean in fact killing. So to re-direct the vast currents of European industry as to involve a great re-distribution of the population would demand a period of time so great that during the necessary stoppage of the economic process most of the population concerned would be dead--even if we could imagine sufficient stability to permit of these vast changes taking place according to the naïve and what we now know to be fantastic, programme of our Treaties. And since the political forces--as we shall see--are extremely unstable, the new distribution would presumably again one day undergo a similarly murderous modification. That brings us to the question suggested in the proposition set out some pages back, how far preponderant political power can ensure or compel those processes by which a population in the position of that of these islands lives. For, as against much of the foregoing, it is sometimes urged that Britain's concern in the Continental chaos is not really vital, because while the British Isles cannot be self-sufficing, the British Empire can be.