332 ENGLISH SAGA

foodstuffs.1 In the same period the storage room for wheat in
a dangerously overcrowded island was allowed to decline when
every argument of prudence and patriotism dictated its urgent
increase.

So also lack of .care for the Empire has given needless
hostages to the aggressor. Because foreign trade and invest-
ments brought bigger returns to the men of money, British lands
that could have bred vigorous and healthy millions of our own
race were neglected in favour of other lands. Canada, with an
area equal to that of Europe, has still only a population of eleven
millions. Australia, more than fifty times the size of England
and the home of perhaps the finest natural fighters the world has
ever seen, has hardly more white inhabitants than Portugal, After
fifty years of British rule the two Rhodesias have fewer than
Huntingdonshire. Those responsible for this blindness may
have profited in their generation. But they helped to lose'us
the forty or fifty millions of our own allegiance and idealism
who would otherwise be fighting by our side against Hitler.
That the total population of all the British nations overseas is
still less than that of Brazil or pre-war Romania is the price now
being paid for a century of enlightened self-interest.

Because of a false philosophy that set the profits and comfort
of the living generation above the needs and security of a
continuing society, the happiness, health and character of the
British people—so strongly founded in the past—has been
jeopardised. Millions of men have been allowed to rot and
eat out their hearts in idleness because bigger profits could be
earned by buying from the foreign than from the home producer*
Much of the finest farming country in the world, inhabited by the
most skilful agricultural population, has been allowed to go out of
cultivation—endangering the nation's vital security—because
it paid vested interests better if Britain did her farming in
the Argentine, Denmark, Poland and Cuba, Even the beauty of
her countryside, an irreplaceable and spiritual heritage, has been
subordinated to private enrichment. The criminal law forbids
a man to obstruct an urban thoroughfare for a few minutes with
a car. But it takes no account of such outrages on the permanent
property of a great people.

lEven the usual economic argument of the expense involved did not apply in this
case, since such a reserve of grant—war or no waiv-would constitute, like Disraeli's
Suez Canal shares, a saleable and even profitable asset.