Britain has the idea that this world has seen the last of over-production. It has become convinced that the real difficulty that gets things out of economic kelter is under-consumption. So it proposes that the ladies shall keep on working, the men shall join them, and arrangements shall be made for such a distribution of their joint product that there will be no over-production!

THE LESSON OF CONSUMPTION

The greatest lesson the British people have learned from the war is this of consumption. They have acquired the habit of being steadily employed at good wages. They have learned how to spend their money carefully, sanely, thriftily. They have learned to save; the bond-selling campaigns have taught that. Thrift came from ebriety, serious-mindedness, and the necessity of stretching all supplies to make them go round. Money ceased to mean so much when one, though he had a bushel of bank notes, wasn't allowed to spend more than "one-and-thrippence" for afternoon tea, with other meals in proportion.

London is full of great houses vacant. Income taxes have done part of it, the

fuel controller much. Who wants a 40room house when the coal administration allows only fuel to heat seven rooms, and when servants cannot be had at any wage? So the great places stand empty. while there is a scarcity of middle-class houses; palaces are too expensive, hovels no longer good enough.

The leveling-up-and-down process is actually happening, and England as a whole likes it. Lincoln said, “God must have loved the common people, for he made so many of them." As for England, the war filled them with the conviction that they are the people, and the government gave them all-men and women-the ballot.

THE FUTURE OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS

The minority that doesn't like the new order will have no power of veto. The House of Lords is far advanced on the way to a reorganization that will make it almost another United States Senateelective and without hereditary right to seats. A parliamentary commission has reported the plan, and it is nearer adop

tion than woman suffrage seemed on the day war broke out.

After that will come adaptation of the federal system to the kingdom. Premonitory rumblings in public thought are telling of it. There will be legislatures, like those of our American States, for Scotland, Wales, metropolitan London; probably two for Ireland; one and perhaps more for England outside London: and all these States will be represented in the Westminster Parlaiment as ours are in the Congress at Washington.

Perhaps the Dominions will at length send their delegates there, too; if not, some sort of truly imperial parliament will make place for them and for closer political union of members that the war has drawn into a new spiritual community.

Not

A BETTER RACE OF BRITISHERS A better race of British men and women will come out of this war. withstanding the physical misfortune to the race of having so many of its best men killed or maimed, Britain will gain vastly more than it will lose through the training, discipline, and physical improvement of its manhood; through teaching reliance, self-respect, realities, true values. The world will gain greatly by a renaissance in Britain of the spirit that made Britishers its pioneers, colonizers, civilizers, administrators. And that renaissance has been achieved.

There will be a movement of Englishmen to the distant quarters of the world; but enough will remain at home to build the motherland to a greater and better position.

Misgivings about Britain sinking to second rate among the powers are at any rate some centuries premature. The tight little island will continue "the powerhouse of the line." It will be developed as never before. It has found itself anew. There is today a perfect mania for eficiency, quantity production, elimination of lost motion, suppression of waste.

One thing that Britain has done during the war will have an effect on the national life not yet to be measured, but certainly far-reaching. That is the rehabilitation of agriculture. In 1918, we

are told, the country has produced foodstuffs enough to feed it for 40 of the 52 weeks. Nothing like that has been done for half a century. It is one of many instances of accomplishing the impossible. Sacred parks and beloved areas of grass lands have been sacrificed; but the food was produced, because there were. no ships in which to import it.

Not again will Britain permit itself to be dependent for its daily bread on the uncertainties of importation. Agriculture is become a chief object of national solicitude, and will remain so. The 1918 achievement would not have been so striking in normal conditions as to labor, animals, implements, fertilization, and the like; but in the circumstances of its accomplishment it is one of the war's wonders.

Britain has learned anew what a great agricultural industry means; has learned that the land is for use first, ornament

afterward. Taxes on incomes, rates on the broad acres of manorial estates, are solving the land question. The great holdings are being disintegrated at a rate of which Americans have little conception.

Single proprietors have sold at auction. hundreds of farms. In one case a nobleman specified that tenants should have preference, and practically all his holdings went to them. Some of the lands had been in his family 600 years, and some of the farms had been held by the same families of tenants for 300; but never had there been, till this sale, the thought of possible ownership.

If this disintegration of land holdings does not proceed fast enough to satisfy the public desire, it will be accelerated by application of further taxation measures which the people have in mind. Mr. Lloyd-George, apropos certain budgetary reforms that when enacted, did not es

"Britain has learned anew what a great agricultural industry means; has learned that the land is for use first, ornament afterward. Taxes on incomes, rates on the broad acres of manorial estates, are solving the land question."