A RAINY DAY.

Observer, Volume XXXV, Issue 45, 17 July 1915, Page 2

A RAINY DAY.

A Menu of Words

BETTER to be poor and full of food than rich with no food available. Wars are won or lost by food, and a starved army is a beaten mob. It may begin to dawn on some city folk that bread doesn't grow in bakers'' shops; that milk is not the product of a marble slab; iand that if you left the finest butcher's shop in Auckland to itself it wouldn't grow a single chop in a twelvemonth. In short, if the farmer ceased to farm the stomach of the populace would be empty and shops wouldn't matter a ha'porth. A few politicians in Parliament assembled the other day babbled about prices of commodities but didn't talk a word about tflieir production.

There is nothing bed-rock about Parliamentary babblers. If flour mills and butcheries and dairies and grocers' shops were shut up we'd still feed, provided wheat and meat and milk and vegetables grew. A handful of dirt is of more consequence than a hundredweight of "Hansard," a paddock of growing crops of more value than the Ministry and a shipload of potatoes than the alleged value of a row of brick and mortar.

The Food Commission didn't grow anything while it was sitting and it didn't do any thing of any value whatever. It discovered what all the papers had previousdly mentioned, that prices had l risen but not so high as in Australia. Life is not sustained by the highest price the exploiter can squeeze out of the eater, but of the largest quantity of food that can be tickled out of the earth. Parliament would be better occupied ploughing or sowing than in babbling. Nowhere in New Zealand has any public adviser done anything whatever to increase thequantity of food, although he ; may have done much to increase the price. The largest part of New Zealand is as devoid of food as an asphalt pavement. And much more' important than futile Commissions is the fact that nobody is worrying as much about possible shortage of iood as increase in prices while food is plentiful. Indeed, that essential person, the producer of things edible is much more concerned with ijieans for sending food out of New Zealand than ir. sending it into t r> stomachs of New Zealanders. We are a very few people living in a magnificently productive land and this is an insurance against starvation ; but we have not recognised the essential fact that an ear of wheat is a greater fighter than a 15 inch gun

The New Zealand man is a good fighter because he is well fedi. He couldn't have galloped up the'gullies of Gallipoli on politicians' speeches, or Royal Commissions, or bricks and 1 mortar, or shop counters. He galloped up it on the contents of his stomach. New Zealand is prodigaL and criminally wasteful. It has never had a spell of really hard times' and it throws away thousands of tons of material poorer countries" would cherish. It burn© its irreplaceable bush and has no by-pro-duct industries; it fails to make millions by chemistry; it throws thousands of tons of food into the waste 1 places and sends countless millions; of pounds up in smoke. Apparently no politician ever speaks or thinks or knows about these things. He is generally a mechanical phonograph exuding someone else's words and of no earthly use in filling stomachs. Filling stomachs is the first duty of any statesman. If New Zealand had' a statesman he would know this. The* peculiar system of "grab the spoils"' makes potential statesmen retire into their shells. # If you said to a New Zealand politician: "What about the breakfast of the people?" hewould ask: "Have the people prepared MY breakfast?" We have noone in charge of public affairs whounderstands his duty to the public,, who realises the value of food', who* knows that Nature's dirt is the be---ginning, the middle and end of everything, who will admit that the essential driving force of every human activity, of every army, of every victory, is the food in the stomach.

* * * Farmers in New Zealand obviously expect a period of waste. It has, already been threatened by farmers that they will "empty their milk into the creeks," and the great shortage of labour, unless rectified and working corps organised will hit New Zealand in the stomach—the one spot that has not been reached yet. Prodigality cs insufficient food is a crime and one that is likely to becommitted in this favoured country. The supreme duty of all governments either directly or indirectly affected by the war is to spur production by every known means, to>

cut out unessentials, to mercilessly pursue the exploiter© and to aid l the person who feeds' the people, not to batten on the people, but to overproduce fox a "rainy day."