Excerpt from England an Account of Past and Contemporary Conditions and Progress For ten years the country had been more or less engaged in war which had left its traces everywhere. Food was scarce; there was no foreign grain in the market in those days, the only supply other than that which England itself yielded being the occasional booty gained by the stopping of the grain ships of neu tral powers and the forcible sale of their cargoes. Later in the year food became still dearer and scarcer. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.