686 TRANSACTIONS OF SUB-SECTION K. 
still exporting States of Eastern Europe, to the New World regions of North 
and South America, and in a minor degree to Australasia. 
Before we quit our session here in Winnipeg we may expect to learn 
something of scientific interest and of economic guidance respecting the 
response of Canada to the Old World’s call. But it is not for grain alone 
that densely peopled countries turn to the new fields of the West. Probably 
the geographical conditions of our place of assembly this year will not 
lead us at all closely into discussion on the variations in the sources and 
fluctuations in the volume of the wool supply, or that of cotton, but the 
possible development of livestock on the territories of newly settled countries 
may be expected to come well within our purview, and afford us lessons in 
the development of the export trade in meat and dairy products, and the 
relation of the Canadian to the surplus of other States. The Royal Statis- 
tical Society of London had a paper this summer by an old colleague of 
mine, Mr. R. H. Hooker, which, although primarily devoted to the supply 
of Great Britain herself, and the price of meat in her markets, has a world- 
wide view of what is going on all around us in the conditions of production 
and of transport ina commodity as important to human life as wheat itself. 
Fully a quarter of a century has gone by since, on a former visit to 
Canadian soil at Montreal in 1884, I raised a debate on this subject of the 
production and consumption of meat, and the various conditions of its 
transport. The twenty-five years that have passed since then have not 
rendered that particular topic a less important one for the consumers of old 
countries or the farmers of new, but ever-varying factors are presented by 
the opening of new territories to exploitation and the denser massing of 
accumulated populations with growing needs, and increasing preference 
for the most concentrated form of aliment. Among the most recent factors 
to be remembered as influencing one side of the meat trade future are the 
admissions of qualified experts in the United States as to the degree in 
which the growth of population there was beginning to trench upon the 
meat surplus of that Republic. On the other hand, the producer will not 
fail to bear in mind the rapidly advancing importance of partially 
developed areas and the great advantage of the more economic forms of 
dead-meat transport now adopted in South America, and will weigh against 
these the degree in which the herds of the vast prairies of North-Western 
Canada may be further utilised when questions of handling economically 
the resultant meat supply may he effectively elaborated. 
To-day, however, and here especially, one cannot but be reminded that 
in whatever direction we look for the aid of science to stimulate the 
development of Canadian resources, or to help the producers now in these 
provinces in measuring the probabilities that lie before them, or to summon 
eager emigrants to the land you have to offer them, there is an intense and 
ever-engrossing interest in the present and the future of wheat. Alike, 
therefore, to the statistician and economist on the one hand, and to the 
experimentalist and investigator on the other, we turn to ask what advice 
they can give to the farmer of a new country with an area so vast as the 
North-West of Canada presents, whether and how far and at what rate, with 
profit to himself and with benefit to the bread consumer across the ocean, he 
can push the extension of the well-nigh eight million acres of wheat land 
which the Dominion claims to show her visitors in 1909. 
The problem, important as it is to this particular region where we are met, 
cannot, however, rightly be treated as a purely Canadian question. It isa 
problem of world-wide interest and of great magnitude and more complexity 
than has been sometimes recognised, for it is none other than the issue of 
the race between population and production so far as at least one primary 
essential of human diet—bread—is concerned. 
Within a year of the last visit to this Dominion of the British Associa- 
tion the question was raised by no less an authority than the then President 
