NOTES.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXV, Issue 8303, 23 November 1915, Page 5

NOTES.

GERMAN FOOD SHORTAGE

We have Jong since oorac to look with very great suspicion upon stories about our enemies running short of this or that commodity- (says a Sydney paper). There have- been so many reports under this head that- have turned out to he .so ridiculously untrue. For this reason the average reader will- hesitate to accept the account latterly coming to hand concerning the ' internal conditions in Germany. The thing cropped up again in recent cables in the form of a statement by a neutral who lias just returned to London from Germany.. He declares that the conditions are more serious than the outside world knows about, and that the food /supply is i causing trouble. He. points to the recent .street riots in Berlin, and adds that a State food /...monopoly is inevitable, 1 but the authorities are delaying it, owing to the alarm it will "cause. Notwithstanding the', great, German genius for national organisation, ■ which should eliminate waste to a remarkable exteu.t, it is just possible that the-- Empire cannot be made to support itself in the matter of food. We have German admissions, made many months ago, that ou a very careful stocktaking of the nation's resources, the food problem, though not insurmountable, offered ' only a very slight margin indeed between adequacy and want. It may. be that the. theory has not squared with practice as , the months hayo gone by. And the sudden campaign launched against German trade with Scandinavia by the British submarines in the Baltic some three weeks ago would 'certainly' not tend-to simplify the problem. Our hope is that one day the periodical reports about food shortage in Germany will begin to be true; but, ris we say, past experience, has rendered it practically futile for us to attempt to decide when fiction has reached the border-line of truth. The neutral quoted may bo quite accurate; but we cannot help recalling that other neutrals before him, pointing to much earlier food 'riots." have made similar statements; and still other neutrals have come out of Germany to declare that* the latter will never be seriously short of food. It seems to be largely a question of the actual experiences of the individual neutral, of his' powers of observation, and of his gift of deductive reasoning —and in regard to these things we have nothing to guide us.