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although in their absence use has frequently been made of the 

 estimates which I laid before the Royal Statistical Society in 1903. 

 I hope before long that the information now being collected and 

 tabulated by the Board will afford a still more satisfactory basis 

 for such calculations in the future. But in any case, as all estimates 

 of this nature must necessarily be founded on the returns of stock 

 collected in June each year, it will be very difficult to measure the 

 quantity of home-produced meat coming into consumption in a 

 calendar year. It is, however, possible to obtain an index of the 

 plentifulness or scarcity of home supplies from year to year from 

 the returns of the number of stock exposed for sale at the 30 markets 

 throughout Great Britain, for which the entries have been reported 

 weekly during the past five years in the Board's Return of Market 

 Prices. The numbers of fat stock entering these markets have been 

 as follows: 



A. D. HALL. The Meat Trade in England. Agriculture and 

 the Development Grant. The English Review. April 1910, 

 London, p. 135. 



"Year by year our farmers are losing the meat trade, simply 

 because the great firms importing foreign meat from America, the 

 Argentine, Australia, and New Zealand, have covered the country 

 with a standard article on which it can rely. The retail trades- 

 man need no longer back his judgment in buying live stock, he 

 is freed from all anxieties about killing and storage, for which his 

 facilities are often poor, he can order his stuff by telephone from 

 the daily price list and then concentrate his energies on the one 

 problem of selling. This organisation will beat the British farmer 

 out of the market except for the very choicest produce; it has 



