ENGLAND.

New Zealand Illustrated Magazine, Volume VIII, Issue 2, 1 May 1903, Page 158

ENGLAND.

King Edward's tour has been a blaze of royal receptions, carnivals, and enthusiastic and loyal greetings. The King and his various hosts formed themselves as is proper on such occasions into royal mutual admiration societies, and nothing that could be said to their respective honor and glory was omitted. After all it is a great thing to have a king who can take his part in such ceremonies with the requisite grace and dignity, one who has never yet made even an inadvertent mistake, or uttered one of those terrible " things which are better left unsaid/ The tendency, so pronounced in these days, of exchanges of royal visits is a marked advance on the time not so lonic past, when kings rarely sallied forth except with hostile intent. One of the prominent questions of the day at home now is that of food in war time. The commission set up to enquire into this most important matter is composed of men whose names are a . guarantee that the finding, whatever it may be, will be as reliable as information gathered by a combination of the best possible authorities can make it. The mention of war and the possibilities of what might happen make one realise how scanty at any given time is the food supply stored in our Motherland. Roughly speaking, the United Kingdom grows only one-sixth of the bread her

people eat daily, and is dependent on other countries for the balance. It is true that the United States supply the larger share of this, and they are not likely to be found in the ranks of our enemies. But in a question of this magnitude, every possibility has to be weighed, and the chance of stoppage of all sea transit must not be lost sight of. It will be easily seen that the matter with which the commission has to deal is both a momentous and a monumental one. England is becoming every day more of the distributing business house of the Empire, and less of the producing, as far as bread-stuffs are concerned, and accordingly her danger in the direction indicated has at length arrived at sufficient dimensions to demand attention. That a remedy will be found for this dangerous state of things no one need doubt. Such a store of grain might be made compulsory by law that would ensure many months freedom from famine. It would only mean getting it over from the countries wherein it is grown, in a less hand-to-mouth fashion, for, reckoning on continued peace with the United States, and the fast increasing output in Canada, the supply even without drawing from any country which might become hostile to us, would serve our needs. We have sufficient;) faith in our Navy to rely on it preventing any stoppage of sea transit of more than a very temporary duration.