26 



IMPORTS OF WHEAT INTO GREAT BRITAIN. 



Whilst these tables exhibit our supremacy in supplying the demand of 

 Great Britain for wheat, it may be well to consider the causes which, in the 

 future, may affect that supremacy. The most prominent now is the growth 

 of Russia. 



Competition fro7n Bussia. — Although the tables show that Prussia supplies 

 Great Britain with a larger amount of wheat than Russia, yet the Prussian 

 exports are grown chiefly in Russia, in its Polish provinces. These are 

 regarded as the best wheat-producing regions in the world; and they lie in 

 the west of Russia, near to Prussia. 



Referring to these imports from Russia, the Mark Lane Express says : 

 " Russia has displayed a great tendency to increase ; and probably, if 

 the Russian Empire was in a more tranquil and satisfactory state, socially, 

 financially, and politically, the strides made would be more rapid. Let the 

 steam-plough once get to work, and the great plains of Southern Russia 

 must pour an immense quantity of cereals upon the European markets." 



The " great plains " here alluded to are the Russian steppes, or prairies. A 

 German writer, who has travelled through them, thus describes them : 

 " What a prospect ! The sun's mighty ball had just appeared on the horizon, 

 and the steppe extended, endless and immeasurable, in all directions." And 

 an English writer says : " The whole of Southern Russia, or, as it is more 

 frequently called. New Russia — as it is the latest acquisition of the great 

 Czaric empire — must have, once on a time, been one huge lake, whose eastern 

 and western shores rose in the Hindukush mountains and the Carpathians. 

 When this mighty mass of water broke its way out, it left behind a mass of 

 slime, formed of decayed organisms, which now forms the celebrated 

 Tchernozon — the inexhaustible black earth, which lies upon a mumular 

 limestone at a depth varying from a few inches to fifteen feet. It is this land 

 which supplies the greater portion of Europe with cereals without any artificial 

 help." 



It is here that the steam-plough may be so advantageously introduced, 

 for these vast fertile plains have neither tree, nor bush, nor rock to obstruct 

 it. These plains, however, are subject to greater climatic extremes than 

 our northwest — to more intense droughts in summer, and more terrible snow- 

 storms in winter. 



Heretofore Russia has made but little progress in agriculture, for its 

 agricultural laborers were serfs. Of a population in 1858 of 61,129,480, 

 twenty-two and a half millions, or nearly thirty-seven per cent., were serfs; 

 and of these, 20,150,231 were attached to the land, that is, sold and trans- 



