66 DUAL-PURPOSE CATTLE 



it made the cost of each one, owing to the amount spent on the 

 purchase of the sire, too expensive to be profitable. A bull 

 costing 100 may be cheap to the breeder who rears, as he may 

 well do, a hundred of his offspring; but a bull costing 35 may 

 be a very poor investment, if not more than two or three heifers 

 of his getting are reared in each of the years during which he 

 stands at service among a lot of milch-cows whose offspring go 

 to market and make no more than the poorest mongrel calf. 

 The wealth lost to the nation through the failure to encourage 

 milk-sellers to breed good calves must be enormous ; but, great 

 as the amount must be, the loss on all youngsters sold on our 

 markets, due to our lack of method, has been even greater. The 

 question of improvement in this respect will be discussed in 

 another chapter. 



The second profitable system of cow-keeping was cheese- 

 making, but this, too, required special conditions: suitable 

 grass-land not too highly rented, a good and permanent supply 

 of water, and, as before, a supply of milkers. But cheese, unlike 

 mflk, had no monopoly protection, and so had less security 

 against the ruinous competition of dumped goods. It must be 

 admitted that this competition often came from farmers who, 

 by improved methods of manufacture and marketing and by 

 breeding only suitable cattle, were able to under-sell our own 

 agriculturists. Even with their improved methods (and only 

 insular prejudice will deny the superiority of their general 

 management) it is doubtful whether the price at which their 

 cheese was sold was enough to secure the workmen of the 

 producers a living wage. Visits to the best cheese districts on 

 the continent revealed a manner of life among the labourers 

 which showed the conditions of our best-housed men in a very 

 favourable light (not that those prevailing in our own cheese- 

 making districts, though generally belter than those in purely 

 corn-raising areas, were anything to boast of); for instance, it 

 was quite common for a cowman's personal accommodation 

 to be simply a sleeping-box in the wall of the cow-house ! 



The competition the cheese-makers had to face was not always 

 such as to make their industry unprofitable; it was only oc- 

 casionally that an excessive supply of foreign or colonial produce 



