increase their fiscal preference for imports from the
Mother-country.

But, immense as Canada's growth was even then, no one country could keep
the manufacturers of Britain busy; and I believe I am right in saying
that at this time the number of those who lived always on the verge of
hunger had increased to at least fifteen millions. Cases innumerable
there were in which manufacturers themselves had gone to swell the ranks
of the unemployed and insufficiently employed; the monstrous legion of
those who lived always close to the terrifying spectre of hunger.

If the spirit of Richard Cobden walked the earth at that time, even as
his obsessions assuredly still cumbered it, it must have found food for
bitter reflection in the hundreds of empty factories, grass-grown
courtyards, and broken-windowed warehouses, which a single day's walk
would show one in the north of England.

You may be sure I thought of those things as I walked away from that
baker's shop in South Kensington. A journalist, even though he be only
the assistant of a man like Blaine, is apt to see the conditions of life
in his country fairly plainly, because he has a wider vision of them
than most men. Into Fleet Street, each day brings an endless stream of
"news items," not only from all parts of the world, but from every town
and city in the kingdom. And your journalist, though he may have scant
leisure for its digestion, absorbs the whole of this mass of
intelligence each day in the process of conveying one-tenth part of it,
in tabloid form, to the public.

If one assumes for the moment that only twelve million people in Great
Britain were living on hunger's extreme edge at that time, the picture I
had of the sullen, angry crowd outside the baker's shop remains a
sufficiently sinister one. As a matter of fact, I believe that
particular baker was a shade premature, or a penny or two excessive, in
his advance of prices. But I know that by nightfall you could not have
purchased a quartern loaf for elevenpence halfpenny within ten miles of
Charing Cross. The Bakers' Society had issued its mandates broadcast.
Shop-windows were stoned that night in south and east London; but
twenty-four hours later the price of the quartern loaf was 1s. 3d., and
a man offering 1s. 2d. would go empty away.

And with the same loaf selling at one-third the price, twelve million
persons at least had lived always on the verge of hunger. I mention the
staple food only, but precis