Complaints are rife and bitter concerning the tough, indigestible, and injurious mixture permitted to the taxpaying public as “war bread.” General condemnation of Government flour has been expressed at a meeting of the London Master Bakers’ Protection Society, where a resolution was passed asking for an interview with the Prime Minister to point out the “ineptitude” of the Ministry of Food. Thousands of us are of the same mind with the Master Bakers! Thousands of us affirm the “ineptitude” of which they speak. Thousands of us know that a more lamentable display of ignorance concerning the “things that matter” could hardly be seen between now and the next world. Furthermore, the Master Bakers (God bless them!) have actually declared that if the Bread Order is not revoked or amended they, to safeguard the health of consumers, will be compelled to take “drastic action.” Well done, Master Bakers! The sooner this drastic action is effected the better for many ailing, suffering human creatures. The faddists and health specialists may talk as they will, nothing can satisfy the appetite or suit the palate of the average man and woman so well and so safely as bread made with pure white flour. The raw germ of wheat, though in a sense nutritious, exercises a “very deleterious effect,” so say the bakers, on the colour and keeping qualities of the loaf. In many cases “war bread” causes internal hæmorrhage, to say nothing of fermentative dyspepsia and severe inflammation of the delicate coating of one’s interior mechanism, and it would be easy to compile a volume of statistics proving the poisonous effect produced by this coarse stuff on our soldiers in hospital who are slowly recovering from gunshot wounds or shell shock, and who are peculiarly sensitive to the quality of their food. The distinguished muddlers who are muddling with the grain and the “milling” thereof, seem to judge the fine and complex human organism as somewhat tougher than shoe-leather and less liable to injury than pig-iron. But they are not the first of their class by any means! There were muddlers before them, as senseless, as callous, and as deaf to reason as they—men who, like themselves, were “dressed in a little brief authority” during that terrific upheaval of which the very name is ominous—the great French Revolution. Here is what Carlyle writes of the bread trouble in those days:—

“Complaints there are that the food is spoiled and produces an effect on the intestines, as well as ‘a smarting in the thoat and palate,’ which a municipal proclamation warns you to disregard or even to consider as drastic—beneficial! But ... the Mayor of Saint Denis, so black was his bread, has, by a dyspeptic populace, been hanged on ‘La Lanterne’ there!”

“La Lanterne” is not a pleasant theme to dwell upon, and we may be deeply thankful that we have something nowadays less ferocious than such a form of settling disputes between the people and their rulers—the great trade unions and protection societies, consolidated bodies of reasoning and reasonable men, who can, when necessity calls, take concerted action against Sentimental Cant and wilful Ignorance. For, to quote Carlyle again, “Is not Cant the materia prima of the Devil, from which all falsehoods, imbecilities, and abnominations body themselves, from which no true thing can come?” And are not the Master Bakers, as well as the Seamen’s and Firemen’s Union, conscious of this Cant somewhere? Whether in pacifism or food-controlling, matters little, so long as they can put an exterminating finger on the spot!

Ours is a land of cranks; we produce cranks as quickly as untended grass grows plantains. We have peace cranks, food cranks, health cranks; and, without doubt, plenty of these will dash wildly into the open with hysterical hymns of praise for the utterly detestable “war bread,” more vigorously possibly when they think their fellow-creatures are being made ill by it. But “let ’em gnash as can,” as the toothless old dame blandly observed after hearing a sermon on hell where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Happily deprived of all ability to “gnash,” hell offered no alarms for her. Similarly, those whose powers of digestion cannot tolerate “war bread” will support the screams of whole-meal faddists with equanimity, saying, “Let ’em masticate as can.” If “whole-meal” gives strength and sustenance with hæmorrhage, most of us will prefer to be a little less strong and well-nourished, without internal bleedings. The complaints of the bread sold in Paris during the fateful months preceding the French Revolution are precisely the same as now; but, whatever the rising tide of discontent may be, we have bulwarks against it in our own people’s organisations, which bind the members of every trade together against any possible injustice or tyranny. This Empire has cause to be thankful for its vast network of trade unions; they are in very truth a governing body whose weight and importance cannot be over-estimated. And so it may be that the Master Bakers will be the saviours of the country’s health, despite Food Controllers and their ideas of “milling.” We are losing enough life, Heaven knows, on the fields of battle; we do not want illness and the spread of disease at home. We can be sparing and careful of grain and precious with our “white flour,” but we need not debilitate or poison our people with food which they cannot digest or which in any way proves injurious to women and children. Waste is encouraged by the making of bread which the people dislike. They would rather throw it away than suffer illness—which is very natural. The Food Controller is safe from “La Lanterne” in these days; but everybody will be glad if the London Master Bakers’ Society will take the matter well in hand and see to it that we need not “live on the husks which the swine did eat.” The country will not starve because we prefer to be well on white flour rather than dyspeptic on brown!