Convict Dress Explained

 

From ‘Lloyd’s Weekly News’ dated 12 Jan. 1908. Convict dress explained.

 

The above drawings show the distinctive dress of various classes of convicts. All the clothing up to number 6 is yellow. Reading from left to right the clothing indicates: (1) First stage (first twelve months) : (2) second stage (two years), black strip on cuffs : (3) third stage (three years), yellow stripes on cuffs : (4) fourth stage, intermediate man, blue stripes on cuff, chevron on cap and arms : (5) star man, blue stripes on cuffs, star on each arm and on cap: (6) grey dress worn by long sentence men who earn 2s. 6d, a month and spend 1s. 3d. on comforts : (7) blue dress for good character; (8) black parti-coloured dress worn as punishment for striking an officer : (3) yellow parti-coloured dress, the penalty for running away : (10) canvas dress for those who destroy the ordinary clothing of their class.

Meeting the Crime Wave

Meeting the Crime Wave: A Comparison of Methods

By Joseph Gollomb

From “The Nation” magazine January 21, 1921

This story is a lot more representative of the work of Joseph Gollomb than my previous post. I'll try and create a bibliography in the near future./drf

The crime wave now afflicting the whole world is a logical aftermath of the war. Economic distress—poverty, insufficient food, clothing, and fuel—the loosing of men’s animal passions, coupled with the general disorgani­zation of our social structure, are producing their inevita­ble effect. While its manifestations vary, subject to local conditions, the disease knows no geographic boundaries, but its treatment is still largely national. Moreover, the police power of the world has been rudely shaken by events. It needs reconstruction, revitalization, and above all in­creased international cooperation. The American has, of course, always taken it for granted that his police organiza­tion is the best on earth, his system of detection the shrewd­est, most scientific, most persevering. Present-day New Yorkers, in the face of a mounting epidemic of unsolved murder and robbery, may perhaps entertain a lurking doubt. But it is questionable whether we could ever justly boast of anything in this direction but a mistaken pride. The actual claims of France and Britain—in fact and fiction—seem more valid. What have we comparable to the great Bertillon and to M. Lecoq? What traditions to equal the famous Scotland Yard organization, what hero of detection superior to Sherlock Holmes? As for Germany, its “verboten” has become notorious as the symbol of the omni­present and ever-watchful arm of the law. We shall do well to study our neighbors’ methods.

The tracking by society of the men who prey on man is already something of a sport and sometimes an art—in fiction. In real life it is a crusade, a science, a profession; there is no sporting ethics in it as yet and police prefer the shortest way to the kill whether it is good sport, art, or neither. But the quarry has grown clever with science and technique, and the hunter has had to keep up with him. The result is that so infinitely complex, delicate, and manifold have become the means and weapons of crime and of man hunting with X-ray, dictaphone, micro-photography, chem­ical reagents, psychoanalysis, organization technique, card cataloguing, and ten thousand other devices that the modern detective has come to exercise something of the care of the artist in choosing weapon and trail in his hunt. It is inter­esting to observe, therefore, the differences in the manner of man hunting shown by the detective systems of London, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and how in their hunting they reveal their racial traits. Let us consider four actual cases.

In a half-asleep residential section of east London is a neglected three-story private dwelling with heavy shutters and doors, inconspicuous and unattractive. It was just the kind of house for which an old man, calling himself Smithers, had been looking. For twenty years he had been accu­mulating money by buying all kinds of objects and no ques­tions asked. He could drive a shrewd bargain and his busi­ness associates usually acceded to his terms, though not without many a curse and often more or less impressive threats. Smithers did not mind the former; but as he grew more and more rich he worried about the threats. He knew his customers. So he tried to hide his riches and lived penuriously. Fear of being murdered and robbed drove him from his business to a retreat. The house, by reason of its inconspicuousness, its strong doors and windows, attracted him and he bought it. He secured every possible entrance with bars and double locks and had his home wired so that nobody could touch a door knob, window sash, or grating without setting an electric bell ringing. In addition he arranged it so that if any one detected the wiring and cut it, the loosened wire, dragged down by a leaden weight, would fall on a cartridge and exploding it would give as effective notice of danger as the electric bell. He lived by himself, received no one, and attracted as little attention as he could.

Nevertheless, one day tradesmen began to wonder why he did not take in off the front steps the articles he had ordered delivered. The police were notified, an entrance was forced. Smithers was found murdered. The burglar alarm had been cut, under the fallen leaden weight was found a pad of cloth and the cartridge unexploded. A strong-box had been rifled. Whoever had done the business was no novice. There was not a finger-print to be found, the work having obviously been done in gloves. The only clue left for the police to work on was a small dark-lantern, a child’s toy without doubt, which had been contemptuously left behind by the burglars.

Scotland Yard went to work on the case characteristically. A conference was held of the Central Office Squad, consist­ing of four chief inspectors, ten detective inspectors, nine­teen detective sergeants, and fourteen detective constables. They went at their problem like a team, captained, but working as one. There was no star performer. With only the child’s lantern to work on as a clue, the problem became at first mere drudgery. A tedious round of manufacturers and toy shops followed to determine if possible where that lantern was bought. In this search team-work was every­thing, individual cleverness nothing. Finally it seemed probable that the lantern was such as a mother in one of several tenement districts in London would buy for a seven-year-old child.

A simple plan was devised as the next phase of the hunt. A detective who had a seven-year-old son was assigned to allow his boy to play with the lantern in the streets of the quarter from which it might have come and to see what hap­pened. For a week nothing at all happened, and father and son were asked to repeat their task in the adjoining district. Here the simple device brought no better results and again they were assigned new territory. This happened several times, until it began to look as though nothing at all would come of it. But with the doggedness of the race Scotland Yard hung on to the trail. Then one day a little boy of the quarter edged up to the policeman’s son, looked sharply at the lantern with which the youngster was playing, and set up a wail.

“I want mah lantern!” he said.

“’Tain’t your lantern!” the policeman’s son retorted in­dignantly.

“Yes, it is! I know it is!”

The detective came forward. “Are you sure?” he asked, gently. “Because my son has had it for many weeks, you know.”

“ ’Ere, I’ll prove it’s mine,” the stranger boy said. “W’en mah wick burned out I cut off a little piece of my sister’s flannel petticoat for a new wick.”

The detective opened the lantern and examining the wick found it to be of flannel, as the boy had said. “We’ll have to ask your mother about this,” the detective said. “If you’re telling the truth you shall have your lantern back.”

The three went to the boy’s mother, a widow who kept boarders. The woman, honest and hard working, con­firmed her son’s claim. The detective kept his word, re­turned the lantern, but questioning the widow further found out that the boy missed the lantern at about the same time that two of her boarders had left without paying their board bills. One had told her that he was an electrician, the other a plumber’s apprentice, and she remembered seeing tools of their trade, or what she thought were such, in their room.

Followed then another series of weary searches by the men of Scotland Yard; searches among young plumbers and among electricians; in the underworld for two young fel­lows answering to the descriptions the widow gave; in the files of criminal records in Scotland Yard; in more expen­sive boarding houses and in dance resorts. Nothing short of a big organization imbued with team work and bulldog perseverance could have accomplished that search. But at last two young men were found whom the widow, unknown to them, identified as her former boarders.

The police had as yet nothing more serious against them than unpaid board bills. So they secretly kept them under surveillance. It was thus they learned that the young men were fond of target shooting with a revolver at trees in the country. The bullets extracted from the trees proved to be of the same exceptionally large caliber as that found in the murdered miser’s brain. Tactfully, patiently, a corps of detectives searched into the past of the two men, each finding out some seemingly unimportant item. But the whole was becoming a net in which one day the two men found themselves inextricably fast on the charge of the mur­der and robbery of Smithers.

Now let us contrast with this man hunt another under similar circumstances in Paris. There had been a remark­able series of burglaries in the aristocratic Etoile section. In each case the burglar—for there was every sign that one man was committing them—took art objects of considerable value but never of such marked uniqueness that they could not be disposed of without difficulty or danger. Indeed the man’s skill in entering well-guarded homes, in gathering his loot, and in disposing of it was such that the Paris police had not a trace to work on. This man, too, worked with gloves, so that there was never a finger-print left of his visits.

The Paris police, so to speak, ran around in circles trying to find his trail. One theory was as little fruitful as another and each man on the hunt followed his own. One detective- inspector, let us call him Dornay, struck out on a lone hunt. Posing as a nouveau-riche art collector and bon vivant, he made scores of acquaintances in the fast set where his quarry might conceivably be found. In this way he became interested in a rather quiet, alert man who knew where good values in art objects could be had. Dornay showed more friendliness than the other accepted and, apparently hurt in feelings, the detective thereafter avoided the un­sociable man, whom he knew by the name of Laroche. Thus far Dornay had only a nebulous theory about Laroche’s connection with the elusive burglar he was hunting. It was so nebulous that the detective could not convince his colleagues sufficiently to secure the number of men needed to keep track of all of Laroche’s movements, for the latter had an uncanny way of eluding Dornay’s vigilance. There­upon Dornay determined to get Laroche unconsciously either to clear or to implicate himself. Watching one night outside Laroche’s hotel he saw the latter leave in evening dress. Dornay stole up to the man’s room, let himself in with a skeleton key, and made a thorough search. The only dis­coveries that interested him were a much-used pair of gloves and the water caraffe and drinking glass Laroche kept on a little stand to the left of his bed. With a file Dor­nay rubbed gently at a spot in the thumb of the left-hand glove until little more than a thin filament of chamois remained, which, however would not be noticeable at a care­less glance. Then the detective carefully polished clean the outsides of the caraffe and the drinking glass. He took noth­ing with him when he left. But next morning, when La­roche again left the hotel Dornay stole back into the room and eagerly examined the caraffe and the drinking glass. With a camel’s-hair brush he dusted some graphite powder on it until Laroche’s finger-prints showed clearly. Substi­tuting other glassware Dornay carefully brought Laroche’s to police headquarters.

Three weeks later still another burglary was reported, bearing all the marks of the elusive burglar. But this time the police found faint impressions of a left thumb—and only that. It was, however, sufficient. Dornay’s instinct and little plot had won. As he knew, the moisture of the human finger is sufficient to leave a print even through gloves if the intervening texture is thin. And the finger­prints on the scene of the latest burglary were identical with those on Laroche’s caraffe and drinking glass.

Call it Anglo-Saxon love of team-play, or a racial disin­clination of the individual to shove himself forward at the expense of the group interest, or whatever other trait it illustrates, the Scotland Yard treatment of the Smithers murder mystery was characteristic. Certainly the instinct for organization and organized effort, which has made Scot­land Yard the foremost man-hunting medium in the world, is the inspiration not of individuals but of the race. In contrast in method was the Paris police treatment of the Laroche burglaries. The Frenchman is keenly individual in his work. It makes him less patient, therefore less effi­cient in organization, and consequently throws him back again on individual effort. He is much more prone, as a detective, to hunt by himself than with his colleagues.

Like the Anglo-Saxon gift for organization is the Ger­man passion for it. But there is a vital difference between the two in the outcome of the organization, a difference which is illustrated in the treatment by the Berlin detective force of a murder mystery that occurred in that city sev­eral years ago. The under-secretary for one of the impor­tant governmental departments was found dead near his home in a Berlin suburb. He had evidently been seized from behind, garroted until dead, dragged into an alley and robbed. It was not till late the next day that his body was found; no one had been seen lurking about the scene of the crime; so that the police had practically nothing to work on, other than the manner of the crime.

But they have a machine in the Berlin police department that works almost automatically in the solution of such mysteries. It is typically a German product in the thor­oughness of its organization, in the ruthlessness of its oper­ation, in the vastness and at the same time in the minute­ness of its product. Its principal part is the Meldewesen. Every citizen and visitor in Germany, the former from the day of his birth, the latter from the day of arrival, is re­corded at police headquarters, a card for each individual, and every card is kept up to date. If, for instance, the police want to know something about Carl Schmidt, respect­able citizen, in three minutes after his name reaches police headquarters they know the date, place, and circumstances of his birth, a brief history of each of his parents—if Ger­man, a cross-reference to their individual cards will give a complete history; his education, religion, successive resi­dences, dates of removals, names of business and other asso­ciates—again cross-references afford fuller information on each of these; the name of his wife, date of marriage, names, and other data of his children; dates of the death of any of the family, place of burial; names and histories of servants, employees, etc. At Berlin this Meldewesen depart­ment contains over 20,000,000 cards today, occupies 158 rooms, requires 290 employees, and is daily growing in size. The cards of names commencing with H alone take up ten rooms, S requiring seventeen.

What happens to any individual in Germany who fails to register can be seen in the working of the Razzia system, which is used as a complement to the Meldewesen, and which the police of Berlin proceeded to use in the case of the strangled under-secretary. The Razzia consists of police raids without warrants on gathering places of every kind and even on private dwellings. Every person caught in such a raid is required to give a complete account of him­self or herself. This account is checked up with the record in Meldewesen. If there is a discrepancy, it means anything from a fine, for a first offense for failing to register, to prison if it is repeated.

In this particular case the Berlin police raided Jungfernheide, an amusement park. Of the people there, three hun­dred could not give a clear account of discrepancies between their status then and what the Meldewesen showed. They were all arrested and a minute investigation of each case begun. Out of the three hundred sixty were found to be “wanted” by the police of other cities for various crimes. At the same time that this sifting was going on a special “murder commission,” appointed to deal only with this par­ticular case, was proceeding with coordinating investiga­tions. Such a commission consisting of seven or eight men as a rule, but calling in as many others as necessary, usually includes three or four of the higher officials of the detective force, a police surgeon, a photographer, and one or two men from some highly specialized detective squad. There are thirty-one such squads, each sharply specialized. These squads are known by numbers and the classes of crimes they deal with. For instance: 1. Church thefts, counter­feiting, safe-breaking. 2. Thefts on stairs, streets, squares, hallways, cemeteries, gardens, lead pipes, zinc, etc. 6. Larcenies in flats, tenements, apartments. 7. Burglaries in flats, tenements, apartments. 11. Thefts of overcoats, umbrellas, canes, in restaurants, waiting rooms, institu­tions, etc. 24. Usury, postal frauds. 31. Perjury.

To the special commission in this case were added two members of a squad specializing on highway robberies and an expert on stranglers. These men sifted out the mountain of cards dealing with every individual who could even in the remotest way be suspected of a possible connection with the murder of Under-Secretary Rheinthal. Meanwhile forty-two individuals caught in the Jungfemheide were waiting in prison together with other suspects arrested without warrant or charge. The search revealed that one of the women detained was the mistress of a man against whom were recorded in the police departments of two cities three former highway robberies and a burglary in which the victim was found nearly dead of strangulation, and through the elaborate system of records of the man’s accom­plices, friends, and family, he was finally caught. Once in the clutches of the police the celebrated method of “sweat­ing” or “third degree,” which includes every possible means of coercion, pinned the man to the crime itself and he con­fessed.

Clearly, then, what solved the Rheinthal mystery was a machine, which is what the German passion for organiza­tion produces, rather than a team, as in the case of Scot­land Yard. With the Germans organization reduces its human elements to cogs and parts of an automaton. In Eng­land it binds human beings into a group, which retains initiative on the part of the individual and adds to it the increased competence of the group. In France organiza­tion is the minor fact, the individual is everything.

Aside from the emphasis which national and racial traits give to their different ways of man hunting, these things are also determined by the manner in which men are chosen in these countries to become detectives. In England the instinct is against the creation of a man-hunting class. Scotland Yard, therefore, looks for its raw material among the common people, preferably those near the soil. The Metropolitan Police send scouting teams into the country and offer sufficiently inviting terms to splendid physical specimens to join the police force of London. They investi­gate most carefully the moral character of the applicants, take the successful ones to London, and school them to become one of the world-famous force of “bobbies.” Then if a man shows special aptitude for detective work he has to pass an examination, is given a special training in the detective school of Scotland Yard, and is allowed to work his way up to the top of the system as fast as merit entitles him to promotion. Three elements in his education are con­stantly stressed—the jealously guarded right of every citizen to untrammeled freedom until sufficient evidence is available to justify arrest; the subordination of individual benefit to the good of the group; the duty of every individual to develop initiative and some degree of specialization.

In Germany the practice is to limit the detective force to men who have had at least nine years’ training in the regular army. By the time a candidate becomes a member of the detective staff he is usually past the plastic stage of life and set in his ways. His army life has drilled every vestige of individuality out of him. He is confronted with a future in which he can rise only a grade or two, no matter how efficient he turns out to be. The higher ranks in the service can be reached only through a university training. The result is that the German detective can be depended upon only to follow a routine. It is a machine that the German system demands, rather than an organization.

In Vienna the detective system can draw on neither a people gifted with regimentalized efficiency, nor the individ­ual efficiency of the Scotland Yard man or the French detec­tive. Yet the man hunting done by the Vienna police equals in efficiency any other in Europe. For, in the professorial chairs, the laboratories, and the research departments of Austrian universities man hunting has attained its highest development. In Vienna it is not organization or the indi­vidual detective or a marvelous machine that hunts the criminal most successfully, but modern science with its microscope, chemical reagents, the orderly processes of in­ductive reasoning, carried out by professors, and a minimum contribution on the part of the professional detective.

Let us illustrate with the murder and robbery of a mil­lionaire recluse who lived in a villa on the border of Wiener Wald. He was found dead in his barn, his skull crushed in with some blunt instrument which could not be found. The only clue left by the murderer was a workman’s cap. Dr. Gross in his celebrated work on criminal investiga­tion, which is the most exhaustive study of the science of man hunting in existence, stresses the importance of hairs and dust as clues. The inside of the cap, therefore, was carefully examined and two hairs found, which were not those of the murdered man. These hairs were placed under the microscope, experts called in, and the following was ascer­tained as the description of the man to whom those hairs belonged: “Man about forty-five years old; robust constitu­tion; turning bald; brown hair, nearly gray and recently cut.” The cap was placed in a tough paper bag, sealed, and beaten with a stick as hard as possible. When it was opened again there was dust at the bottom of the bag. This dust was microscopically examined and chemically analyzed. Disregarding the elements that came obviously from the floor of the barn where the cap was found it was discovered that wood dust, such as is found in the shop of a carpenter, predominated. But there were also found minute particles of glue. The combination pointed to a wood joiner.

There was such a man living near the scene of the crime, who also answered to the description derived from the two hairs, a man of morose temperament rendered desperate by drink and poverty. A search of his premises for the instru­ment which might have caused the death of the murdered man yielded a hammer and two mortar pestles. The ham­mer with its octagonal nose was found incapable of inflict­ing the shape of the wound in the man’s skull. The pestles fitted. There were two of them, an iron one rusted in spots and a polished brass one. The rust spots on the iron one were found on chemical analysis to be due to water. But under the metal polish of the brass pestle, when it was carefully scraped away, were found remnants of stains which on analysis and microscopic examination proved to be blood. By a system of reagents developed by Professor Uhlenhut the blood was found to be that of the murdered man. After the investigation had proceeded a little further the murderer broke down and confessed his guilt.

Nothing is too small or insignificant to furnish clues to the Vienna school of laboratory detectives. The marks of teeth on a cigar holder left on the scene of the murder were found to indicate unusually long canines, a clue which led to the murderer. The dust found in pocket knives or clasp knives with which crimes had been committed brought many a criminal to justice wholly through laboratory methods.

The readiness of the German police to search, arrest, and detain citizens on the slightest ground, and the methods em­ployed by the French police in extracting confessions from suspected persons vary fundamentally from the procedure followed in man hunting by the English. When a Scotland Yard man, backed with a warrant, makes an arrest he is compelled by law to say to his prisoner: “Do you wish to make any statement? I warn you that anything you say now may be used against you. You are not required to make any statement.” It is generally acknowledged that a confession extorted from an accused would be barred as evidence in English courts. In contrast to this is the brilliant record made by a Paris detective in tricking arrested suspects into confessions. This man would cultivate the friendship of the accused, say, of murder. Outside of prison the detective would spend most of his time investigating not so much evidence of the prisoner’s guilt but his grievance against the murdered man. Then one day he would rush into the ac­cused man’s cell, his face burning with indignation. “My friend!” he would exclaim. “I don’t understand why you hesitate for one instant in confessing that you killed that snake! I am not a bad man myself. But if any man ruined my business and outraged the woman I love and did a tenth of the vile things that snake did to you, I would kill him and be proud of it!” “Isn’t that so?” the accused would ex­claim—and find himself betrayed.

In England a man’s home is his castle and a detective is limited accordingly. No search can be effected, no arrest made without a warrant based on such evidence as will con­vince a judge in open court. In Berlin a police lieutenant boasted with truth to a student of European police meth­ods : “I can have my neighbor arrested, his house searched, and the man detained in prison for twenty hours even if he is innocent as a lamb. And I can do it without a process beforehand or being made to answer for it afterward.”

This free hand the German police has, together with the infinitely elaborate net in which the German public con­sents to live, gives its detectives a tremendous advantage over the English. A man’s house in Germany is not his cas­tle; an accused can be forced to testify against himself; the habeas corpus is not the institution it is in England. As Sir William Harcourt said: “You must not be surprised if the English police is sometimes foiled, baffled, or defeated. . . . It is the price England pays for a system which she justly prefers.” On the other hand the German system does not necessarily argue a slavish people. The German is equally surprised at the English lack of the institution of the Meldewesen and other aids to the police. “What do peo­ple in England do to find where a certain criminal is?” a German asked in discussing the Meldewesen. “And why should I resent the Meldewesen when it operates to protect me against the criminal? Also suppose I want to find out the address of any man in Berlin or Dresden. For a small fee the police will get it for me. As for the right of search and arrest, well, an innocent man will not suffer long. In return he gets the protection of a system from which the criminal undergoes a maximum of insecurity.”

As the criminal becomes more and more international in his operations, more and more cosmopolitan in his knowl­edge of the ways of man hunters, so the latter, too, are forced to become broader in their hunting methods. The science and some of the organization technique of the Aus­trians and the Germans are being added to the equipment of Scotland Yard. Republican Germany, on the other hand, is modifying some of the autocratic police abuses established by an imperial regime. Paris police are working in close harmony with Scotland Yard and are assimilating from them some of the lessons of team work. Vienna is borrow­ing German organization and Scotland Yard emphasis on the selection of the raw material of its detective force and has surpassed Scotland Yard in the educational training it now gives its operatives. Some day there may even come true the dream of several visionaries among police chiefs—an international police headquarters in The Hague or in some other city from where man hunting in Europe will proceed on a world-wide scope and with the combined skill of all nations.

The Enemy in England

The Enemy in England

Part IX of the series ‘England in Arms’.

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, January 1918.

It is not inconsistent, though it is unfortun­ate, that those charac­teristics which, in time of peace, are counted to a nation’s credit, in time of war oft-times stand to its dis­service and mischief. Bound into the very foundation on which the British Empire was built, close, indeed, to its keystone, is tolerence; just as, sooner or later, the first crumbling breach in the walls of German resistance will show where intolerance has been so prominently fixed. But as even a virtue, uncontrolled, may approach a vice, so Britain’s (especially Eng­land’s) acceptance of the widest ap­plication of tolerance, in a time when little counts but the life of the nation and the sternest support of those great principles which focus only in the defeat of an inhuman foe, has become to it in certain stages of the war a menace it should not have risked. And yet it is so much easier to moralize than to follow the straight path of virtue as demanded by the altered conditions of war that his­tory is not apt to sum up England’s part in the war as a careless disre­gard for the sensible precautions that consider only victory.

Behind England’s calm tolerance of the enemy in its midst stand the principles of government that have held together an Empire more di­verse than ever before was bound to­gether even by the thinnest threads. The ancient Romans, whose dominion was more ambitious but infinitely less effective and extensive, never at­tempted the feat of welding such con­fusion of tongue, such diversity of character, such uncongenial spirits as Great Britain has governed with­out serious strife for generations Necessarily it had perforce to be a government of indulgence, of conces­sions, of licence. To weave into one fabric the Scotsman and the Indian and the Chinese, and the hundred distinct units of a hundred corners of the world, imprinted that on the English character which has made him a cosmopolite. It has opened his mind to a thousand vagaries of individual belief. It has opened his hand to the puny communities of dis­tant sections which would have been beneath the notice of any other na­tion. It has opened its doors to the world’s refugees—which means not alone the world’s downtrodden but its criminals, its outcasts, its great un­wanted. And with the unlimited opening has grown up an intolerance of intolerance, a firm reputation of the closed corporation, in national as in commercial life. Only in his pri­vate life does the Englishman cling to the barriers.

England became a haven, built in those principles. The Anarchists of France and Spain and Italy found a home there; the Nihilists of Russia fled there before the sword of unre­lenting Czarism; the political out­casts of a score of countries swarmed to the little island that refused to give them up to the avenging hand of their own countries. And, more dan­gerous than all, the spies of the na­tions that train spies as a feature of the national system, found there their mart of exchange, their delving ground, their most profitable source of the information which might some day be used against the country that gave them shelter. It has always been presented as the best justifica­tion of this attitude that the Anar­chist and the political exiles who harbour there have thrown aside their dangerous tenets in their relationship to England. But it is a defence which has been repudiated more often than has been made public and from which countries friendly to Great Britain have suffered almost without protest. When Winston Churchill turned machine guns on the foreign criminals of a street in East-End London he was but laying the foundation for an enlightenment which has been spreading over Eng­land since the greatest war in his­tory revealed new national prin­ciples. But tolerance died hard. Indeed, it is not dead, though the Empire pays for it in human blood.

One must let these truths pene­trate in any examination of the treat­ment that has been meted to the enemy alien in England. No nation, and especially not England, can throw aside the principles of genera­tions that have built up such an Em­pire. Add thereto the sporting in­stincts of the Englishman, the desire to give even the most powerful and menacing enemy the privileges of open combat, and there opens up some­thing of the reasons behind the leni­ency which met the German and the Austrian and the Turk who had found their homes in the British Isles. Consider therewith, too, the freedom of action which these foreigners enjoyed for so long that they had been able to make themselves powers in the land, hacked by the official support of their own govern­ments, aided by the co-operation of a million fellow-countrymen in other parts of the world. These men had wormed their way into the very na­tional framework, of finance and in­dustry and commerce, even into poli­tics. They had stormed society with gold and kingly honours. They had married their sons and daughters to English daughters and sons, often, it is certain, merely in pursuit of the common aim of influence. They had won or purchased staunchest friends, in civil as in political life. They held many of the imposing properties which commanded respect and sub­servience as ancient rights. In the House of Commons were ardent de­fenders whose honesty has never been impugned, as well as a few others whose motives might well be questioned.

So that when the war broke out they had behind them the English wall of tradition, the firm support of influential friends, the trust of the powers who alone could curtail their liberties, and the pride of the Eng­lishman who disdains to excite himself over any peril. They were many times entrenched.

To the man on the street it would seem to be the part of wisdom in­stantly to protect the nation against the machinations of the enemy resi­dent. But the man on the street finds the way to action long. Canada, as well as England, has been indul­gent to the German in its midst. The politician is bound by different views, by different motives and necessities. It happened that in the British House at the outbreak of war the Home Office was under one whose sympa­thies were loyal enough but more ac­tively tolerant. Indeed, the head of the office has at all times concerned himself with the enemy alien and his rights and protection more than is agreeable to the public and to his fellow Ministers. It may be more the fault of the estimated duties of the office than of the man himself. With the declaration of war nothing was done to control the spy. Evid­ences of his handiwork were not only suspected but revealed in a score of cases. Prominent Germans, known to be in the favour of the Kaiser, were afforded their customary liberties. Enemy firms whose interests were wholly German were permitted to conduct their businesses along the usual lines. England, with its eyes firmly fixed on the star of its lofty principle in entering the war, was far above the crude pettiness of in­dividual coercion and limitation. Glowing speeches, that might have sounded well in history had Great Britain won the war during the first four months, were delivered by the page to convince the public that we were waging war on Kaiserism, not on the individual German. It sounded well, but the public was going by sight not by sound. And in the meantime the individual Ger­man in many cases was doing his ut­most for Kaiserism.

The state of public opinion early in the war drove the resident Germans and Austrians by the hundred to take out naturalization papers; and, ac­cording to the law, there was nothing to prevent. The Schmitzs became plain Joneses, and the German signs on the fronts of scores of shops gave place to good old British names with­out changing proprietors. Protest by the press was met by lifted hands of helplessness. The announced de­termination of the German rulers to exact retribution from those Ger­mans who did not remain true to their homeland, the declaration that a German could secure naturalization in a foreign country without affect­ing his German nationality, had no effect on the stand of the authorities.

Only when the Zeppelins in early 1915, dropped death on innocent Britons and friendly foreigners did the public take the course of events into its own hands. Each raid was followed by rioting in the East-End of London that threatened much more than the destruction of a few German shops or injury to a few Germans. To hold the mob in check the Government was forced to take steps to intern 20,000 Germans and Austrians throughout England. In haste the internments were decided upon, but it was noticeable that only the uninfluential Germans were touched, with here and there one of note to make the total bulk large. The relegation to private life of the Prince of Battenberg from his posi­tion of authority in the navy early in the war was but one of these act’s of pandering to public clamour without realizing the justice of the protest. At the time the internments com­menced there was established an Ad­visory Committee whose duties have apparently been to find ground for excusing prominent Germans from internment, not to intern. In all the list of angry queries which have been thrown at the Government by en­thusiastic Britons in the House, there are remarkably few replies pointing to internment upon the advice of this committee, while every German at large has been protected by its re­ported findings. All over England well-known Germans went about their daily work, not quietly and inoffen­sively, but boastfully. Many instances have been quoted of a sneer­ing ridicule of their enemies. “They can’t intern me” has been hurled by impudent Germans in the face of angry fathers whose sons have died through the release of information that can have been obtained only through spies.

In the time of Asquith the Ger­man in England fared exceedingly well. Only after persistent pursuit by the press was he interned, and from his comfortable quarters in Donnington Hall or in the other elabor­ate quarters where he was semi-con­trolled, he looked out upon an England disturbed and suffering from a war that inconvenienced him little. He was clothed and fed and waited upon as few Englishmen. His wife was paid an allowance of from five to ten shillings a week more than that allowed the wife of the British soldier fighting in France. His business was run for him, either by an English de­puty who paid him the profits, or he was permitted occasional freedom to oversee it. In the two years and more of the Asquith war Premier­ship scarcely a German business was closed down, although hundreds of them were theoretically under con­trol. Asquith’s lax methods made action repugnant, in spite of the con­stant protest of an influential press. To be sure Enemy Trading Acts were introduced, intended to prevent enemy profit, but there was nothing to prevent a Briton carrying on the business and piling up the profits to be paid the German proprietor after the war is over. Many of these Ger­man firms even secured large con­tracts from the Government at the expense of the British firms.

The entry of Lloyd George into the field promised more than it ef­fected. He found himself faced by a people more intent on the noise of protest than an effective action to satisfy that protest. They saw and resented the freedom of the enemy in the country and to some extent backed the steps necessary to curtail it; but the ways of the country intervened, and had it not been for papers like the Northcliffe press there would have been little more done than to intern a few powerless merchants who had thus far escaped. Then, too, the Court of Appeal came to the protec­tion of the German. Taking advan­tage of the laws of the land—laws he would have laughed at in his own country—many a German secured his liberty. The Court of Appeal declared that a German at large in England is not an enemy alien, and debts were collected on the strength of it. Lloyd George did, without delay, place in internment several of the best known Germans whose im­munity hitherto had been a matter of marvel and whose brazenness threat­ened a popular uprising. But always there was evident a desire more to ap­pease the public than to effect a pub­lic benefit. From the beginning the coercion of German subjects and naturalized Germans has been with a view to exercising official control as little as possible.

The Home Office, driven by a group of influential Britons whose sympa­thies from the first have been with Germany, has undertaken the care of the German resident, and Lloyd George’s administration has altered this attitude little. Official appeals were sent all over the country for firms to engage interned aliens. There was, no doubt, the excuse that it would save the expense of intern­ment, but there was far more the danger that these men, who had been considered dangerous enough to look away from the public, would be able to resume most of their former ac­tivities and opportunities for evil; and there was the subtle folly of se­curing good jobs for a foe whose re­lentless style of warfare placed them beyond more than mere human con­sideration. The move was discounted from the first by the indignant re­fusal of employers to throw open their shops to the enemy.

A committee had been formed early in the war for the benefit of the alien enemy, its funds provided by some of the best known naturalized Germans, German admirers and paci­fists. In the list were included such significant names as Haldane, Beit, a prominent Government Official, and the Cadbury Brothers. The influence of the latter was great. As the pro­prietors of two London daily papers, they had been insistently declaring from the first rumours of war that it was impossible, that Britain misun­derstood Germany; and ever since, as Quakers, they have been edging towards peace at every stage where such a word dare be mentioned. Public disgust expressed itself most effectively when a county Prisoners of War Committee returned Mr. B. Cadbury (these are the Cadburys of cocoa fame) the five pounds he had contributed, on the ground that they could not accept it in the face of a personal contribution of £750 and a firm contribution of £1,500 to the funds for interned and uninterned aliens. This pro-enemy committee was constantly at work endeavouring to ease the lot of the enemy alien, soliciting work for him, purchasing luxuries denied our prisoners in Germany, and generally presenting his case to the authorities and the public.

The matter of German businesses walked the same uncertain course under the new Premier. Here and there a German business that had been much in the public eye was closed, but until the press took up a case nothing was done to it. The English manager of Bradstreet’s, German born, continued to sign the firm’s letters, although theoretically supplanted, until the folly of it was exposed in the press. Of the German banks which had been closing for al­most three years one was finally wound up. But in this act, too, was evidenced the unduly favourable treat­ment accorded the enemy. In strict British fairness, debts owing the Ger­man firms were set against their own debts; yet it developed that, while the British debtor was forced to pay 20s. on the pound, the British credi­tor received only 13s. 4d. The Ger­man debts, incurred when the mark stood at 20.40 per £, were paid at an existing rate of 30.45, although at the moment there might be sufficient assets to pay at the full rate; and no one seemed to be able to state how the rate was established.

Failing to find places for the in­terned Germans in British firms, many were allowed freedom to reopen or manage their former businesses. Others were freed for no apparent reason but that they might resume their former methods of life, living on their incomes. Here and there Germans who had been interned re­appeared in their old haunts without public explanation. For some of these someone had gone bail, others were allowed out for a sort of holiday, and still others were released on the word of influential friends or for unknown reasons. The lot of those left in internment continued to be com­fortable. At the time when the country was rationing itself, the Germans in Donnington Hall and Alexandra Palace were allowed much larger food supplies, and only when protest was made in the House was a change in­troduced. To-day, when thousands of homes are unable to secure coal through transportation difficulties Alexandra Palace is amply stocked. An example of superlative kindness to the German is that in Donnington Hall there are 115 servants to wait on 389 German officers.

And still there were at the middle of 1917 about 22,000 Germans and Austrians at large, less than half of them women; and at the last returns given in the House several thousands were living in areas that are called prohibited, where the most valuable information is obtainable. One prom­inent German purchased recently through his son an estate within a mile of a hill commanding a wide view over the sea, and in the House it was stated that he had been already fined for trading with the enemy and his son for showing a bright light at night. An uninterned German was arrested with important secret military documents and an officer’s kit bag in his possession, with German calling-up papers in his pocket. A celebrated Austrian painter has only now been taken into custody (his case was fought out before the advisor committee), although he became naturalized only after war was declared and at the time a letter of his in friends in Austria told of his reluctance to seem thus to repudiate the land of his birth, as well of his enmity to “the predatory Serbian nation”. A German was shot by an officer for in­trigues with the latter’s wife, after the police had known for months of his origin and his association with a woman executed as a spy. Two foun­dations of German monks were until recently allowed complete freedom in England. On the very day the papers announced a fine of £100 against a British engineer for attempting to purchase without a permit a pistol for experimenting, the English Con­sul-General for Montenegro arrived at a summer resort in England with an Austrian valet who had been ex­empted from internment by the Home Office. Several German women have been found doing service in the homes of British officers. The British wife of an interned German was recently lightly fined for attempting to pur­chase an aeroplane seating four and capable of flying to Germany. As there are many German escaped of­ficers still at large the affair assumed a serious aspect.

Even the Government itself seemed disposed to do its best in its own de­partments for the Germans. In the central telegraph office were, at one time since the middle of 1917, eight men, in addition to Belgians, not Bri­tish-born. A young man who claimed exemption from military service on the ground that his parents were Ger­man was found employed in a Gov­ernment telegraph office, through which the most important secrets pass­ed, although substitutes offered them­selves. The assistant constructor at an important dockyard was the son of a German father and had visited Germany shortly before the war. A naturalized German was permitted to live close to a large aerodrome. The Minister of Blockades appealed for the exemption of a young German on its staff—and the tribunal granted it. A man of German descent was appoint­ed British Commercial Attaché at The Hague, although his brother had already been convicted of disloyalty, and only the persistent outcry of the press obtained his dismissal after the Government had once refused to yield to public indignation.

Indeed, from the first it has been a constant struggle between the public and the Government or certain pow­erful interests in the Government. The latter have steadily refused to take the steps necessary to overcome the spy evil until they were forced to it by the people; and even the English people have endured what few other countries would permit. Now and then some public body with sufficient Power to make itself heard has acted. School trustees have dismissed their pro-German teachers, and won their cases when the law was appealed to. At least one university rid itself of two or three German professors after the German names attracted public attention. The guardians of a spe­cially fitted hospital refused to ac­cept more German wounded when they found that their entire main building was filled with 1,700 Ger­mans, while in the annex were a thou­sand British. As the apparatus pro­vided was unexcelled in England, the guardians claimed that its benefits should be more largely open to Bri­tish wounded.

In all this favouritism to the Germans were bound up the energies of the pacifists and conscientious objec­tors. In public meetings before their friends, in their own press, in the House of Commons, the most was made by these men of fair treatment to the enemy, their idea of fairness being favouritism. Every month or two a question was asked concerning complaints about the food at the internment camps, although the ra­tions were superior to that which was allowed the British soldier. No com­plaints seem to have been made at the camps themselves, but there were al­ways friends in the House anxious to forestall rationing. The same influ­ence that rendered the British bloc­kade so ineffective until the United States acted was at work from the beginning of the war to protect the enemy alien in England. While Great Britain was allowing to percolate through its blockade net the very es­sentials of life in the enemy countries, is was also handing out to German prisoners and to the interned treat­ment not accorded our own soldiers at home and not expected or asked for our interned in Germany. But the question of the blockade included other issues that hound Great Bri­tain’s hands, releasing them only when the United States stood behind it at the source of supplies. What tem­pers one’s sympathy with the difficult position Britain finds herself in in supplying neutral countries is the fact that food was even being shipped to South America.

Yet it is not for Canada to criticize. England’s pacifists have never been al­lowed the freedom of expression enjoy­ed by a few traitorous spirits in Can­ada; nor has such political use been made of pro-Germans in England as has characterized political operations in Western Canada. The handling of enemy aliens is theoretically simple of plan and action, but in the every­day life of a nation, even at war, there are interests and influences that seem willing to sacrifice the country to the worst of foes.

The next article of this series will be “The Human Side”, describing the mar­vellous work for the welfare of the distressed in England.

The Food Problem

The Food Problem

Part VII of ‘England in Arms’

By W. Lacey Amy

From The Canadian Magazine, November 1917

To date the problem faced in the feeding of the people of the British Isles is not that of food shortage, but of food distribution. To the foreigner that assertion may seem to deprive the situation of most of its seriousness; to us who live through it and watch its development there­in lies more menace than in the ex­pressed hopes of the Kaiser. British ingenuity may be depended upon more confidently to overcome the enemy than to alter internal affairs in order to cope with unusual condi­tions. Nothing is so powerful against the Englishman as his habits and system.

No one in the British Isles has felt the pinch of hunger. And it is not likely that anyone will. What suffer­ing there has been arises from the temporary shortage of unessentials and from high prices. Sugar and potatoes sum up the total of national deprivations owing to the war, and never did they approach privations because there has always been some­thing to take their places. Before there is actual want the British will have solved the submarine. But after three years of a situation that has continually pointed to food as one of the vital factors in the winning of victory they are only now nearing the solution of a situation with which the enemy has nothing to do—which is, indeed, indigenous to the British race, but more particularly to that section of it residing in England and Scotland.

The problem of distribution is two­fold. The limitation of supplies—rather the necessity of conserving for an uncertain future—demands an equality of distribution that ignored individuals and class. The second difficulty is the British character—an independence which resents con­trol and dictation. Of the two the latter was the more immediately dan­gerous at the beginning of the con­servation movement. But common sense is asserting itself, so that equal­ity of distribution now occupies the time of the Food Controller. When he found temperance in eating to be so necessary as to justify Govern­ment action, the Englishman yield­ed to a pressure which he naturally resists. But having yielded, he was forced to set to work on the national system of class favouritism—as, in­deed, he has been forced to do in every problem connected with the war.

It was Britain’s unquestioned com­mand of the seas that delayed food measures which were reasonable from the very first gun. That inbred and time-honoured confidence in victory laid a heavy hand on reasonable pro­vision and prevision in every act of war. In the matter of food arbitrary measures did not seem to be necessary early in the struggle. Depend­ing entirely, as it did, on the control of the seas, Great Britain was justi­fied in her confidence, a confidence that would never have been shaken had the Germans adhered to the rules of warfare.

One measure only was taken early in the war to protect the food supply of the British Isles, an obvious one immediately demanded by the fact that they had been procuring more than sixty per cent. of their sugar from Germany. A Sugar Commis­sion was appointed. Thereafter, for more than two years, even when the casual onlooker was viewing the situa­tion with alarm and the Asquith Gov­ernment itself was talking much of plans in the House, nothing further was done. Always in the mind of the people was the thought that the enemy could not drive Great Britain to defensive measures that would re­flect upon its special sphere of power; and in the mind of the Government was the hope that political balances need not be disturbed by restrictive action certain to be resented in some quarters. For it must not be imag­ined that party aims and hopes dis­appeared with the formation of a Coalition Cabinet.

The second official move of import­ance was made in October, 1916, when a Wheat Commission undertook to readjust the grain situation. Unfor­tunately it was weighted down with the Asquith love of laisser-faire, and its duties never materialized into ef­fective action. At a time when the enemy was openly sinking merchant vessels and threatening more, when the demands of military operations and national supply were so deflect­ing shipping from the ordinary chan­nels of food transportation that re­serves of grain in the British Isles were being seriously depleted, no action was taken towards replenish­ing these supplies from a world’s pro­duction that was above the normal. America and Australia were offering the grain, but England was not will­ing to disturb the trend of affairs in order to facilitate the acceptance of the offers.

The press of England was becom­ing alive to the menace, and the Eng­lish press has a voice more powerful than that of its brother across the ocean. The people were growing anxious. The difficulty of securing sugar was impressing even the thoughtless with the need for action. Mr. Asquith was forced to promise operations which were loathsome to him, not alone for their antagonism to his policy, but for the danger he well saw would arise therefrom to his personal popularity. He an­nounced the establishment of a new department headed by a Food Con­troller. It promised well. But the Food Controller was never appoint­ed. Week after week the country waited. Mr. Asquith was at his best in his promises of what that import­ant official would do—in his explana­tions of the delay. He was at his most natural in his inability to come to the point of action.

It was the accumulation of such dilatory acts as these that brought about his downfall. Just three days before an anxious Cabinet, backed by a roused people, demanded his resig­nation, Mr. Runciman, one of his Ministers, placed before the country one lone food measure that even then looked like a small mouse for the mountain to bring forth. Restric­tions were placed on restaurant fare—or rather attempted restrictions. Luncheon was to be a two-course meal and the ample English restaurant dinner was to be limited to three courses.

With that heritage Lloyd George assumed power. His first discovery in connection with the food situation was that his predecessor had taken no inventory of the nation’s supplies, had made no move to simplify the work of the Food Department, which had immediately to be organized. One of the first officials appointed in the new Government was a Food Con­troller, Lord Devonport, a man whose intimate connection with food supply as the head of a large multiple store company seemed to qualify him for the position. It was a disappointment to the country and to the Premier himself that the seeming qualifica­tions for the Controller’s office should in the end prove the insuperable obstacle to his effectiveness. Lord Devonport introduced many measures intended to cope with a situation passing rapidly into a serious stage, but a calm survey of them discovers them to be, after all, paltry, a mere touching of the surface.

Lord Devonport took pleasure in vetoing the Runciman restaurant or­der four months after it had been put into effect, and almost the same time after its folly had become evi­dent. The limited course meal brought only one result, that diners ate more solid meat, and less of the odds and ends, the entrees and unessentials and make-overs, that give the dainti­est touch to restaurant fare without affecting food stocks. Men formerly content with a small helping of meat in the interests of the decorative courses, demanded meat and bread and cheese, the basis of subsistence. The new Food Controller, too, was forced to deal with bread, tea, con­fectionery, potatoes and other vege­tables, and sugar.

His substitute for the Runciman restaurant control was a meatless day and a limitation of the amounts of meat, bread and sugar served at each meal. This was later altered because of its drain on bread in order to take the place of meat on the meatless day. Bread he attempted to regulate by prohibiting its sale until twelve hours after baking, and by limiting its shape, weight and constituents. The adulteration of flour by maize or rice, and the prohibition of the waste that produces white flour, resulted in what is known as war bread. It was an effective measure, despite the con­tinued opposition of the people. Tea—considered in England almost as great a food necessity as bread—was regulated in its cheaper qualities. A curb was put on the use of sugar in confectionery, pastry and icing. In the early part of 1917 potatoes were passing so rapidly into the list of shortages that price limitation was necessary. Three cents a pound for old stock was established for the early months, rising later a half-cent. But no measures could increase the sup­ply, and no attempt was made to pre­vent the farmers holding their stocks for higher prices. For months it might be said there were no potatoes in England. And with the failure of potatoes the vegetable substitutes ad­vanced until the Food Controller was forced to limit the price of some of them.

Where Lord Devonport failed was in his reluctance to take a firm stand, to enforce the law, and principally to curtail the profits of the trader. He attempted to solve the problem by appeal. A chart of patriotic pro­portions in the daily diet was flung at the public in a thousand ways. The fences were covered with it, the news­papers gave it daily space, lecturers flooded the country, and, at a time when the shortage of paper was seri­ous, the workingmen’s pay envelopes were crammed with a literature he never read. To the credit of the coun­try the consumption of bread and meat materially decreased. But the two insuperable obstacles to success were the inability of ninety per cent. of the people to purchase the advised ration of sugar and the eagerness of some to seize the opportunity for gorging. While there were millions willing to curb their appetites there were flaunting thousands of pro-Ger­man sympathies or utter carelessness whose delight it was to evade the ap­peal and the laws. And at the very time when the people were begged to stint themselves interned and impri­soned Germans were allowed many times the ration; sugar and potatoes were being commandeered for them when the workers of the country had to go without. The inconsistencies of the situation were intolerable, and the effectiveness of the appeal diminished weekly.

In the matter of enforcing the law there was singular laxness. Here and there a dealer was fined, although it was impossible to go on the streets without seeing plainly advertised in­fractions of the food laws. And the fine was usually but a small part of the profit made from the illicit trans­action. Indeed, there was apparent, in store and home and restaurant, a merry revelry of law evasion that un­did the patriotism of those who hon­estly rationed themselves.

Profiteering went on without re­striction. Lord Devonport, head of a big grocery concern, persisted in refusing to limit the profits of gro­cers save in a few glaring and insig­nificant cases. Swedes, for instance, the substitute for potatoes, were limit­ed in price to three cents a pound, a price so many times what the farmer and greengrocer had been receiving that neither could complain. The setting of prices for potatoes and beans was much advertised but unimport­ant, for both disappeared from the market almost immediately. Although the cost of bread to miller and baker was materially decreased by the new laws, the price advanced instantly to the consumer two to four cents a four-pound loaf. While a few bakers out­side London were content with the profits from seventeen-cent bread, the London baker charged twenty-four. The attempt to democratize tea was a failure. Forty per cent. of the im­portations were to be sold to the pub­lic at fifty-two and fifty-six cents, but no one was ever able to purchase a pound of the cheaper price, to my knowledge, and if the better quality of Government tea was inquired for it was either out of stock or sneered at by the grocer. Neither price was ever displayed in the windows dur­ing Lord Devonport’s term. The same happened with cheese. A large part of it was taken over by the Govern­ment to be sold over the counter for thirty-two cents, but it never appear­ed on the shelves of more than a very few stores.

With meat no attempt was made to interfere until the last days of Lord Devonport’s office, and then only the speculator was eliminated, the re­tailer being permitted to ask what he pleased. Of the retailers the butcher was the most heartless profiteer, the consumer being asked sixty to one hundred and fifty per cent. profit over the wholesale prices. Even the sup­plies controlled by the Government, such as New Zealand mutton, were turned loose upon arrival in England for the wholesaler and retailer to make what profit he wished. Laid down in London by the Government at thirteen cents, it reached the pub­lic at thirty-six to sixty cents. The butcher could not buy it without a large purchase of English mutton at extravagant prices. And in the mean­time, in order to maintain the level of prices, tons of meat were left to rot on the docks.

There is no better example of the injudicious and unfair distribution of supplies than sugar, the commodity that has induced several crises al­ready. To the people the only result of the Sugar Commission was an im­mediate rise in price. Against this there has been constant complaint, for it is known that the rise repre­sented taxation and Government pro­fit. It was not until the latter part of 1916 that a shortage began serious­ly to be felt; but from the first pinch the shortage increased until stocks seemed to have disappeared from the market, so far as the poorer classes were concerned. By December women were walking the streets from shop to shop begging half-pounds. Queues had not then commenced, because sugar was the only shortage and the grocer sold only to whom he liked.

It is this independence of the mer­chant that has driven home to the country the disaster of typical of­ficial control, so called. Each week the Sugar Commission released to the wholesalers their shares of the avail­able supplies, and washed their hands of any further connection with the commodity. Theoretically the whole­saler was supposed to pass on to the grocer his share, but that he had favourites is proved by the fact that some of the large West End stores seemed never to be without sugar, while the small grocer of the East End was denied a pound. It must be remembered that every pound of sugar shipped to England was Gov­ernment-controlled. No control what­ever was exercised over the retailer save in the matter of price, and the shortage of the available supplies en­abled him to make sugar the basis of his trade. He sold to whom he pleas­ed in the quantities he pleased. His independence became impudence. A customer was always a beggar, for he was entirely at the mercy of his gro­cer. Sugar was denied those who could not afford to make their pur­chases extravagant. Some system seemed to arrive with the demand for a purchase of fifty cents’ worth of other goods with each half-pound or pound of sugar, and this was accept­ed by the authorities as a wise pro­vision against wasteful purchases of the limited commodity. It was the strength of class in England that for many months prevented the authori­ties from realizing that such a stipu­lation reserved sugar for the rich who could afford to buy supplies they did not need in order to obtain the sugar they did. It was only when the mer­chants began to extend the same de­mand to the purchase of other food­stuffs that the Government forbade any conditions with the sale of sugar. But the grocer was still left to sell to whom he pleased. No improvement whatever resulted, since the grocer simply refused to sell until another large order was given.

The cry of the poor—the long, hope­less queues, the untrained cooks help­less to provide for their large families without that which had made up such a large part of their food—was piti­ful. And all the time the West End shops were selling it in fifty-pound lots or less. The Government’s loose effort to enable fruit-growers to pre­serve their fruit was equally unfair. The growers sent in their require­ments, and the sugar was released to the grocer mentioned in the requisi­tion, but without any control over the amount he passed on to the grower. Of four friends, no two received the same proportion of that which they had asked for, the amount varying from fifty to ninety per cent. No one knows what the grocer should have given out. The latest measure in the handling of sugar, to come into force in October, is a form of card supply, but still there is no safeguard that the grocer will sell to his customers their individual shares of the avail­able supplies.

The clamorous protest arising was more than threatening. Lord Devonport accepted the inevitable and re­signed. Lord Rhondda assumed the thankless job. It is typical of Eng­lish public life that only a titled man is considered competent to undertake public work. The war has introduced a Geddes or two; others will have to follow. Particularly unfortunate in the matter of controlling resources is this habit, since these wealthy titled men are so closely concerned in a financial way with the industries and commerce of the country that unpre­judiced outlook is nigh to impossible. Lord Rhondda had made good in his first Government office and in private life, and initiative was not lacking. His misfortune was that he was ap­pointed at a time when public im­patience would not brook delay. With­out time to study the situation and devise methods he was driven to in­stant action. The result was a hun­dred more or less vague promises that seemed to fit in with the demands of the people, and one act only of the immediate future. Profiteering was the bête noire of the people, and on profiteering he came out strong—in word. Thus far there is only the promise that profiteering will be pun­ished by imprisonment. Speculation is to be stopped, how is not apparent. Lord Devonport had already issued orders to that effect in the case of meat without affecting much the price to the consumer. The only definite act which would tend to soothe the people was an obvious expedient. It dealt with the commodity most fa­miliar to the table—bread. Bread was ordered to be sold—some time in the future—at eighteen cents a quartern loaf.

Realizing that the British Isles might be called upon to depend upon their own resources, he turned to the farmer. Land was tilled that had never been broken for centuries, and the farmer became a real producer. If he didn’t, there was a law to take his land from him temporarily. Ploughing was done by tractor, night and day and Sundays. The added crop acreage was expected to amount to millions, but lack of tractors and help and quick co-operation reduced the amount to less than half a million acres. Next year the millions are promised. Allotments sprang up everywhere—vacant lots, golf links, railway tracks, parks. London alone is producing eight hundred extra acres of vegetables. The additional growth has reduced the price of po­tatoes for the moment to less than it was before the war; and the absence of market organization is leaving tons to rot, England was driven to act before she could complete the organ­ization necessary to reap the greatest reward.

The solution does not yet appear. If the submarine continues even its present success, and the measures of the future do not improve substan­tially on those of the past, the British Isles will feel want. Private profits, private shipping, block all the Gov­ernment can do. The controlling in­fluences of supply and demand are non-existent in time of war. With Government interference they lost al­most all their power, in all justice. To continue that power is to exploit the Government of the people at the cost of the people. To-day the old tenet of the economist means nothing more, in the case of importations, than to ask the people, at their own ex­pense, to make trade possible by im­port regulations and transportation protection, and then to expect them to pay the trader according to the volume and expense of that protec­tion. And locally-grown products are directly dependent for price, especial­ly in England, on the available stocks from without.

The stopping of profiteering is a pleasant ambition to talk about but an over-lofty one to anticipate. Pro­fiteering does not end with the grocer and butcher, the wholesaler and ship­per. It has entered into every phase of home life. Only the man in khaki, who assumes all the risk of war, is precluded from it. The workingman, the clerk, the farmer, the thousands of Government officials who have risen with the war—even the Govern­ment itself—are profiting from the war. But the burden is uneven. The workingman of England can present a good defence in terms of compara­tive wage scale, but in terms of total receipt—which is the basis of his liv­ing—he might be called a profiteer. His five pence an hour of pre-war days may have increased only sixty per cent., while living has advanced one hundred; but his week’s envelope contains probably three times—often six and ten times—what it did before the war. The decreased facilities for drink and idleness keep him longer at work, and the additions of bonus and overtime are not infrequently greater than his regular wage.

The next article of this series will discuss the elaborate plans being made in England for the conservation of materials.