68 DUAL-PURPOSE CATTLE 



a price as would repay the cheese-maker for laying out money 

 on a really good bull. But, usually, the calves by a good bull 

 were not sent about the country for promiscuous sale. The 

 careful and upright dealers would secure them for their own 

 regular customers, and so the great bulk of the British rearers 

 grew accustomed to mediocre stock. 



It will easily be seen that a cow that will give 800 gallons of 

 milk yearly, or (allowing for the reduced flow after the first two 

 calvings) an average of 750 gallons throughout a milking life 

 of seven years, and is also quite a good beef producer > is superior 

 to what nature would produce unaided by skilful selection of 

 parentage. To populate a whole countryside with such animals 

 requires systematic effort and co-operation intelligently directed. 

 It is the absolute failure of comprehensive collective action to 

 secure for the home industry a supply of animals best suited to 

 their requirements that has led to our country being covered 

 with cattle very much below the standard just suggested. In 

 the absence of State aid, and of systematic assistance by those 

 who ought to have taken the lead during the bad farming period 

 between 1870 and 1900, nearly all the magnificent efforts of 

 our countrymen, born live-stock improvers as they are, were 

 concentrated on satisfying the demands of those overseas 

 customers who offered higher prices than were obtainable 

 from the much poorer English tenant-farmer. As the overseas 

 customer wanted cattle for purposes of stealing from the soil, 

 and as the home agriculturist was in many cases struggling 

 to farm in competition with those stolen goods, their interests, 

 so far from being always identical, were in fact more often 

 altogether antagonistic. In the next chapter the evils of these 

 conditions will be considered in some detail, for in them lies 

 the chief cause of our having so many inferior commercial herds 

 of cattle. 



