The newspapers were fairly evenly divided in their expressed opinions. The Government had recently adjourned Parliament, after a session in which their majority had oscillated dangerously more than once, and the Opposition Press seized upon the Blight in order to embarrass the Cabinet, and especially the Prime Minister, as far as possible. They clamoured that the Government should take steps to secure the food supply of the country by making immediate purchases of wheat in the foreign markets. They demanded that a system of rationing should be established forthwith; and that cases of food-hoarding should be stringently punished. Day after day they held up to public obloquy the individual members of the Cabinet, who were then scattered on holiday; the amusements of each of them were described and coupled with sneering hopes that they would succeed better in their games than they had done in the government of the country and the safeguarding of the national interests. Echoes of the Mazanderan Development Syndicate scandal were kept alive in the most ingenious manner.
The Government Press, naturally, professed to see in the inactivity of the Cabinet a proof that they had the matter well in hand. Avoidance of panic, restriction by voluntary effort of all unnecessary consumption of food, and the postponement of inquiries likely to interfere with the wise projects of the Premier: these formed the stock of their leading articles.
The gutter organ of the Opposition retorted by publishing the complete menu of the Premier’s dinner on the previous day, which it had obtained from some waiter in the hotel at which he was staying; and it accompanied this item of news by interspersed extracts from the Government organs in which appeals had been made for a less luxurious form of living.
It must be remembered that this stage of the sequence of events occupied only a brief period. If I am not wrong, it was within ten days of the outbreak of the Blight that we got the first American cables announcing the appearance of the epidemic among the great wheat areas of the Middle West. Almost immediately after came similar news from Canada.
The meaning of this was not at first appreciated by the people as a whole. They still clung to the idea that grain would be forthcoming if a sufficiently high price were paid for it; but those of us who had tried to forecast the possibilities of the situation found our worst fears taking concrete form. Soon even the unthinking were forced to understand what the American news implied. If the Blight spread over the wheat-fields of the Western continent, there would be no surplus grain there for export at all. That source of supply would barely suffice for the mouths at home.
Then, following each other like hammer-strokes upon metal, each biting deeper than the last, came the cables from the rest of the world. Egypt reported the outbreak of the Blight in the Nile valley; British East Africa became affected. The news from the Argentine fell like a thunderbolt, for we realised that with it the last great open source of wheat had failed. The Don and Volga basins followed with the same tale. Over India, the Blight raged with almost unheard-of virulence. Then, days after the others, Australia was smitten, and our last hopes vanished.
During all this period, it must be remembered, we had no idea of the origin of our calamities. We referred to the thing always as “The Blight,” though it was made clear at quite an early stage that no plant parasite was concerned in the matter at all. The most careful microscopic examination of affected vegetation had been made without revealing anything in the nature of a fungus or noxious growth.
Yet, on looking backward, I cannot help feeling that we, and especially I myself, were strangely blind to the obvious in the matter. I have already mentioned that when I rooted up a clump of grass in Regent’s Park it came away from the soil without resistance; and that when I examined the roots I found them almost as free of earthy deposit as if it had been grown in sand. That, coupled with what I already knew, should have put me on the track of the explanation; and yet I failed to draw the simplest deduction from what I observed. To account for this obtuseness, I can only suggest that already the idea of a “Blight” had taken root in my mind; and that I was so obsessed with the idea of a parasite that I never considered the facts from any other point of view. Since others proved to be equally slow in arriving at the truth, I can only conclude that they were misled in their mental processes much as I myself was.
As I have said on a previous page, it was to Johnston, the bacteriologist, that we owe the discovery. It appears that he had been growing some bacteria in cultures; and, whether by accident or design, he had left one of his cultivation media open to the air. On examining the germs some days later, he had discovered in the culture a type of bacterium with which he was unfamiliar. He proceeded to isolate it in the usual way—I believe it is done by dabbing a needle-point into the culture and using the few microorganisms which stick to the needle as the parents of a fresh colony—and he was amazed at its fecundity. There had never been such a case of bacterial fertility in his experience.
A paper in the Lancet brought the description of the creature to the notice of the scientific world. Johnston himself had not recognised the nature of the organism, as he had never dealt with this type of
