insufferable misdemeanours and disorders" which in feast-time marked" the dishonour and scandal of the Inner Temple." Again, under the relaxation of morals in the reign of Charles II, gambling among the apprentices had to be severely put down. They were as ready to follow the example of Whitehall, as they were quick to join the City, in whose "liberties" they stood, by public manifestations of rejoicing, such as John Evelyn took part in at the Restoration-" 2000 horse and foote brandishing their swords and shouting with inexpressible joy; the wayes strewd with flowers, the bells ringing, the streetes hung with tapissry. . . . The Masters of the Chancery and Judges going first, and so the Lords in their order being splendidly habited " for the coronation of Charles or Queen Anne. On the other hand, be it remembered always, the great Coke had been a vehement opponent of arbitrary Stuart ways and had suffered for it. The Temple also contributed its share of regicides and of men who, after migration to America, worked for secession from the Crown. It had welcomed Raleigh and Drake to its feasts in Elizabethan days, as it welcomes all leaders of eminence now. Its power as stimulus and storehouse of thought is clear from its influence upon Charles Lamb and Dr. Johnson, John Austin and Edmund Burke, Charles Dickens and Thomas De Quincey, Congreve and Hallam and Hyde. The world would be poorer, but for what Henry Crabb Robinson, Sheridan and Inigo Jones have given us; and how many of them, in their several degrees, are indebted for the space they needed to grow and develop on their proper lines, to the quiet and inspiring atmosphere of Fig Tree Court, Pump Court, Plowden Buildings and the Cloisters? The gardens are justly famous to-day for their own spacious beauty; for refreshing relief from crowds in a busy centre, and the help they offer to the culture and the study of flowers. Was it not here that Shakespeare in “" Henry V " set the scene of York and Lancaster adherents, choosing their rival roses? And here the Inns of Court Corps, which did such timely service in 1914, has exercised its men since its foundation by James I. Speakers of the House of Commons and Chancellors to sit on the Woolsack have come thick and fast from the Inner or Middle Temple, who shared in the upkeep of "The Round" and its Master-a Sherlock, a Hooker, a Vaughan, an Ainger. A generation ago all Londoners knew Temple Bar, the Gatehouse which Wat Tyler had wrecked, where Titus Oates and Daniel Defoe were pilloried, and where Johnson saw impaled the heads of the traitors who had suffered in 1745. It was known as a symbol of liberty, strength, loyalty to King and Church. A later degenerate day allowed Temple Bar to disappear, that the new Law Courts might rise. The germ from which this tree of knowledge, rooted in the Temple, has grown is that chivalry and self-sacrifice, set forth in the shrine and sacred Moot Hall, built on the model of the church over the Saviour's tomb in Jerusalem. And the Knights Templars of our day, the champions of justice and right, of close-linked fellowship in domestic reform and imperial adventure, follow the footsteps of their great predecessors. The origin and youthful struggles of their great Order they are not allowed to forget, when they gaze admiringly at the Kneller portraits in their halls, the tomes of stored learning in their libraries, or even the Temple stairs, which, now unused, witness to that once great trafficking and progressing by boat and barge from Middlesex to Surrey Side, from Fig Tree Court to Westminster. Temple "Bridge" was a strategic point of lasting importance, before successive fires had removed Castle Baynard and, with it, much of the building which Templars had reared since Plantagenet days. Here they had welcomed and admitted "by courtesy to their ranks Martin Frobisher and Sir John Hawkins, whose tomb was at St. Dunstan-in-the-East; Drake and Alderman Watts, who had fitted out his ships the Margaret and John to fight the Armada, and who became a founder of the East India Company. In such cases they bound themselves to give advice gratis in all common law proceedings, and never to give counsel against their friends. It is substantial help they can and do give to Empire-building and true religion; to modern pilgrims wayfaring toward a less material Jerusalem, while they build the abiding City of God. Orabunt causas melius, and that is no small contribution to the main duty of our age : Tu regere imperio populos Romane memento ARTHUR G. B. WEST FEW FOOD AND POPULATION "EW writers have experienced more ironical vicissitudes of opinion than Malthus. He produced a book, clear and closely reasoned, in 1798; it brought him a flood of popular abuse, but also the esteem of the rising economists, and it stirred public opinion sufficiently to become a factor in the decision to take our first census of 1801. Then circumstances conspired to belie the immediate consequences of his conclusions, until the name of Malthus became a synonym for a false prophet and gathered also certain unsavoury associations from late nineteenth century controversy. For, in the nineteenth century, the world's population, of which Malthus had foreseen a necessary limitation, made its unprecedented advance. Thanks to the development of steam power, to the opening-up of new countries, particularly of America, and to a lesser degree to the discovery of artificial fertilisers, the world's population increased from something between seven and eight hundred millions in 1800 to seventeen or eighteen hundred millions in 1900. Human labour became so much more effective that a vast cheapening took place of all the major human requirements, even of food, the prime necessity. The average price of wheat, which had been 46s. 3d. a quarter for the twenty years preceding the Napoleonic wars, was only 328. 10d. for the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. When a world process continues unbroken for a century it is apt to be mistaken for a law of nature and, until the break-up of our traditions produced by the Great War, there were few signs of a realization that the expansion of the nineteenth century could not be continued indefinitely. We had been warned that coal and oil would be used up, but fresh discoveries had always seemed to defer exhaustion to an indefinitely remote date. The marvels of electricity and other scientific discoveries blinded the ordinary man to the fundamental fact that all the developments grew from the transformation of stored energy and not from its creation. The greater part of the world's work is being done out of the stored capital represented by coal and oil, compared with which the utilization of renewable energy such as water power, wind or sunlight, is but trifling. VOL. 244. NO. 498, X But though the possible exhaustion of our sources of power has received some attention, very little thought has been accorded to the continuance of food supplies for an increasing population. Amid the abundance of the later years of the nineteenth century only one warning note was uttered. In 1898, Sir William Crookes, addressing the British Association, directed attention to the exhaustion which was taking place in the great plains of the middlewest of America, from which abundant supplies of wheat were being drawn for European and particularly British consumption. The settler in the middle-west had entered upon land of amazing richness, consisting of black soil-the debris of an epoch of grassy vegetation-which often extended to a depth of four feet, with a nitrogen content throughout only equalled in the few top inches of our richest English soils. Here was material for the production of an indefinite number of crops, but under the system of cultivation pursued, it was steadily being exhausted. A succession of cereal crops was continuously taking nitrogen from the land. Even the stirring process of cultivation itself leads to further exhaustion, so that within living memory some of the thinner soils have become incapable of bearing crops profitable under so primitive an agriculture, and the settlers have moved on to new ground. But Crookes's forecast in 1898 did not immediately come true; the tide of wheat across the Atlantic did not slacken. Even when the good land began to run short in the United States, Canada and the Argentine only developed their wheat-producing areas the faster. Moreover, in one important respect, Crookes had misapprehended the problem. Soils do not become exhausted if they are properly handled, if they are farmed under a conservative rotation instead of being plundered. Much European land has been continuously cropped since the days of the Romans or earlier, and is if anything more fertile than ever. A few years before Crookes' address it had been demonstrated that leguminous crops, in virtue of their partnership with a bacterium, leave the land richer in nitrogen for their growth. Almost simultaneously another bacterium was discovered in soils which brings atmospheric nitrogen into combination, deriving the necessary energy from the combustion of non-nitrogenous plant residues in the soil. In this way, a soil on which a leguminous crop is grown at short intervals, as in the typical English rotations, and to which again are returned the straw and the debris of crops consumed by stock (i.e., farmyard manure), maintains indefinitely a certain level of fertility. The American prairies, after their first exhaustion, can produce an even bigger yield of wheat per acre, provided that they are farmed on a rotation involving the growth of fodder crops and the keeping of stock. At the end of the nineteenth century one had only to compare the yields of wheat in England-in the neighbourhood of 32 bushels to the acre-with that of the new countries from which we were drawing wheatabout 13 bushels to the acre-to conclude that the world's production of wheat was still only on the verge of its possibilities. Nevertheless, the prospect of unlimited cheap food has now become doubtful. From the beginning of this century the real prices of wheat and other agricultural produce have been slowly but steadily rising, and after the wild oscillations produced by the war, though high prices had forced enormous areas in America into cultivation, the hardening of food prices tended to continue. It was the consideration of these factors that led Mr. J. M. Keynes to adumbrate the approach of food scarcity and to redirect attention to the original doctrines of Malthus. It is true that Sir William Beveridge, addressing the British Association—appropriately enough in Canada, where the expansion of the wheat area has been so marked-dismissed these fears as groundless. He pointed out the low level of production that was still being attained in the newer countries as compared with the higher yields of western Europe, and concluded that, whatever might be the case in the British Islands, "the limits of agricultural expansion are still indefinitely far." Corn prices, however, have still shown a tendency to harden, and other observers have seen dangerous features in the situation, so that the problem of our future food supplies merits reconsideration. We have the contradiction that a definite tendency to rising prices is accompanied by a depression which affects the farmers both of Great Britain and of the Americas, and indeed of all countries that have not adopted a definitely agrarian policy of protection for the farmer. In this re-examination the central point to which attention must be directed is the amount of land available. It may at once be stated that the enormous expansion of population which took place in the nineteenth century was |