It may be objected that the writer, feeling the danger so strongly, should have taken other means than fiction to put his views before the authorities.  The answer to this criticism is that he did indeed adopt every possible method, that he personally approached leading naval⁵ men and powerful editors, that he sent three separate minutes upon the danger to various public bodies, notably⁶ to the Committee p. vifor National Defence, and that he touched upon the matter in an article in The Fortnightly Review.  In some unfortunate way subjects of national welfare are in this country continually subordinated to party politics, so that a self-evident proposition, such as the danger of a nation being fed from without, is waved aside and ignored, because it will not fit in with some general political shibboleth⁷.  It is against this tendency that we have to guard in the future, and we have to bear in mind that the danger may recur⁸, and that the remedies in the text (the only remedies ever proposed) have still to be adopted.  They are the sufficient encouragement of agriculture, the making of adequate Channel tunnels, and the provision of submarine merchantmen, which, on the estimate of Mr. Lake, the American designer, could be made up to 7,000 ton burden at an increased cost of about 25 per cent.  It is true that in this war the Channel tunnels would not have helped us much in the matter of food, but were France a neutral and supplies at liberty to come via Marseilles from the East, the difference would have been enormous.

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