i6i 



CHAPTER IX. 



NATIONAL AND COMMERCIAL. 



IN considering poultry and poultry products 

 as national food, or as a branch of com- 

 merce, or as an industry, the point which 

 most forcibly strikes any British student is the 

 constant and enormous growth of foreign im- 

 ports, and of eggs especially. Hundreds of 

 writers have commented upon the fact, and 

 the statement that " millions of British money 

 goes out of the country for foreign eggs which 

 might just as' well be produced at home," is 

 a commonplace of leading articles which appear 

 in the principal daily papers with statistical' 

 regularity every year. Giving only alternate 

 years for the sake of space, the following simple 

 table gives the number of eggs imported into 

 Great Britain, their declared value, and their 

 average declared value per long hundred or 

 I20, from the year 1856 to igog. 



The immense amount of this import trade 

 is plain enough, as is also the startling fact 

 that the number of eggs thus imported equals 

 about 55 per head of the inhabitants of Great 



Britain (excluding Ireland from this figure, 

 as being herself an exporting and not import- 

 ing country). It is further evident that the 

 values of such importations have grown more 

 rapidly of late years ; and it may seem natural 

 to draw the conclusion that the foreigner is 

 " ousting the British producer," so far at least as 

 regards the market for eggs. The moral is 

 often added, that the British producer is doing 

 nothing, and is being to all appearance "hope- 

 lessly out-distanced " by the foreigner, owing 

 as supposed to the latter's superior methods or 

 the nature of his farming. 



Natural as such conclusions may appear, 

 they are in the main mistakes arising from 

 ignorance. We remember a great statesman 

 once declaring from his place in Parliament, 

 how he had found in his experience that 

 amongst all the different sorts of lies, the worst 

 were statistics. In sober truth, the number of 

 presumed authorities who are capable of truly 

 judging figures and reading their real lessons, 

 appears very small. In this case the foreigner 

 is doing nothing of the kind, as can be readily 

 shown. The first step towards drawing true 



conclusions about foreign imports is 

 Analysis of to analyse the gross figures them- 

 Importa. selves ; and the following table 



gives the value during 'the six years, 

 1904-1909, from the five countries which supply 

 the vast bulk of the trade; all other countries, 

 apart from Italy, Austria-Hungary and 

 Canada, amounting in 1909 to no more than 

 ;£'928,I4I, which we will deal with separately. 



Note.— The blank in Belfiiun 

 .■aUie from this country was ir 

 •other Countries." 



All other countries till recently included 

 Canada, and in 1891 amounted to ;£'i6o,496. 



