Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/19

Rh in the exploiting of a country for purely commercial advantage. As yet in no year has so large a quantity as 1,250,000 metric quintals been obtained from Algeria, and the import shows little tendency to increase. It may be noted that even England obtains little assistance from her colonies in the supply of this one article. In 1896 only one twelfth of the wheat imported came from her possessions, and, eliminating India and Canada, she could obtain hardly enough to meet her wants for a single day. Nowhere is colonial empire closely connected with the question of wheat raising and supply.

There is no more instructive lesson in history than a government struggling with the economic inevitable. That this experience is more fraught with failure than with success is not surprising, for the social problems come slowly forward and are well under way to accomplishment before the symptoms are noticed or a diagnosis attempted. The discovery is made by those who have no proper appreciation of the true remedy. It is some interest that feels the pinch, the increasing pressure of the change that always accompanies a social movement. The wish and effort are directed to maintain the conditions as they were, conditions to which the operations of industry or commerce were accommodated by long usage. This interested effort, ever conservative, opposes the progress of development on new lines, and too often makes a blind use of whatever instrument of defense is at hand. The protection of Government is invoked to stave off the inevitable, and a greater and greater exercise of that protection is invoked as the weight of the necessary change becomes greater. Industries have been wiped out, commerce destroyed, governments overturned, and peoples impoverished by this unreasonable contest with what is inevitable. Natural conditions, the product of land tenures, habits, and national character, have thus far been sufficient to preserve the French farmer from that intense crisis through which the English landlord has passed; but the end is not yet. France to-day holds an almost unique position in wheat among the nations of Europe, and it is only misapplied political agencies from within or more intense competition from without that can shake her in this eminence.

, the Devonshire (England) geologist, who is perhaps best known by his exploration of Kent's Hole, Torquay, while seated one day on a settle at a wayside inn, answered some questions asked him by three day laborers, and got them so much interested in a conversation on stone-breaking that the landlord took notice of the matter. The next morning he addressed the geologist: "I hope no offense, sir; but ef you'd stop 'ere for a foo days or a week, and talk to the men in the evenin's, you shud be welcome to meat, drink, washing, and lodging free gratis. I'm sure lots o' men wud come and hear 'ee, and I should zell an uncommon sight o' beer"