rts. Up to the point where we consumed our own food and
manufactured our own goods it has been a great national development. Our
annual exports of food decreased during the past twenty-five years from
some 15,000,000 tons to about 6,000,000 just before the European War. In
the meantime we increased the import of such commodities as sugar, rice,
vegetable oils, until our net exports were about 5,000,000 tons. Of the
kinds of food exported this probably represents a decreased export of
from twenty-five or thirty per cent of our production down to five per
cent of it.

During the war we gave special stimulus to food production and produced
greater economies in consumption so that these later years somewhat
befog the real current, for our agricultural surplus in normal years is
really very small. During the war and since, we have given great
stimulus to our manufacturing industries. If we shall continue to build
up our manufacturing industries and our export trade without
corresponding encouragement to agriculture, we will soon have more
mouths in our country than we can feed on our own produce. We shall,
like the European States which have devoted themselves to industrial
development, ultimately become dependent upon overseas food supplies. If
we examine their situation we find the very life of their people is
thus dependent upon maintaining open free access to overseas markets.
From this necessity have grown the great naval armaments of the world,
and the burden they imply on all sections of the population. Such
nations, of necessity, have engaged in fierce competition for markets
for their industrial products. Thus they built up the background of
world conflicts. The titanic struggles that have resulted have
endangered the very lives of their people by starvation. Their war
tactics have, in large degree, been directed to strangle food supplies.
One other result of this development is the terrible congestion of
populations in manufacturing areas with all the social and human
difficulties that this implies.

There is a jeopardy in industrial over-development which has received
too little attention because the world has only experienced it during
the past eighteen months. In times of industrial depression, or great
increase in the cost of living, whether brought about by war or by the
ebb and flow of world prosperity, these populations, oppressed with
misery, turn to political remedies for matters that are beyond human
co