SHEEP HUSBANDRY. 193 



same amount of mutton loses only twenty-four pounds. This may 

 seem an unimportant fact, but it will have a wide influence upon 

 this question in the future. 



Still more, as a knowledge of the laws of health and disease 

 becomes more generally diffused among the masses, as Doctors 

 gradually come to be what their title implies, Teachers of the 

 people, it will then be understood that not only is mutton the most 

 economical but also it is the most nutritious of all varieties of animal 

 food. When then the laboring men in our factories and shops, on 

 our railways and in our fields, learn that they can have just as 

 large a roast for fifteen cents as they can for twenty-two, and at 

 the same time one which will give them more strength for their 

 daily tasks. New England farmers will not have to wait long for 

 customers for the meat-proceeds of their sheep-folds. 



But a well fattened carcass is not the only return that the sheep 

 makes to her faithful keeper ; she yields him an annual revenue in 

 the form of Wool. 



I am well aware that my subject here encounters the objection so 

 often and forcibly raised against the business of sheep husbandry, 

 that the wool market has been so fluctuating that no man could 

 calculate with any safety upon the annual returns for his clip of 

 wool. 



As the work of raising wool is intimately connected with that 

 of making it into cloth, the ups and downs that have characterized 

 wool-growing for the last fifty years, have been just such as have 

 marked the business of woolen manufacturing. They have not 

 been enjoyed over-much by either party. 



As great as these fluctuations have been, they have been 

 exceeded by those of some other departments of our industry. 

 For the past sixty years, the price of fine wool has never but once 

 dropped below thirty-five cents a pound, and that for a single 

 year, — the first under the tariff of 1857 — while for this entire 

 period it has averaged somewhat over fifty cents a pound. For 

 about forty years previous to the stimulus given to wool-growing 

 by the late war, fine wool but once reached seventy cents — the 

 year 1831 — under the tariff of 1828. This surely is not a very 

 wide fluctuation, when we remember that during these same years, 

 wheat has oscillated between thirty-seven cents and two dollars 

 per bushel, and corn showing variations in prices, four-fold greater 

 than have characterised the wool market. 

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