172 



Thirty Years of Milling. 



great drought on the other. The watermills are very far from 

 being extinct, and there is, happily, no prospect of their extinction. 

 The progress made in scientific stock-feeding has come to their 

 aid, and since the progressive breeder and feeder of both 

 animals and poultry finds meal, and rations including meal, more 

 profitable feed than the unbroken raw food, he has become a 

 steady customer of the small local mills, which grind cheaply 

 and deliver economically. The owners of watermills in man)' 

 districts where there are no big towns have moreover " saved 

 themselves " by becoming in part distributors. If the average 

 loaf to-day contains twenty-three parts out of thirty of foreign 

 wheat, (this, or y&6 per cent., is the average proportion 

 shown on returns of home yields and imports respectively), the 

 position of many watermills, with their small grinding capacity, 

 will be well met. They will grind the seven parts of locally- 

 grown wheat themselves, and they will buy the twenty- 

 three parts of American or other foreign wheat, already ground 

 by the nearest big town or port millers, and they will dis- 

 tribute the whole thirty parts as a complete delivery to 

 the local bakers and to houses baking their own bread. Such 

 bread will be excellent in flavour, strength, nutriment, and 

 digestive quality, but the rough grinding in the ordinary 

 local mill will cause the seven parts ground therein to be 

 rather poor in colour. This, it is to be feared, is injurious to 

 trade. The demand, especially of the poor, for the whitest of 

 bread, is a survival of a very long established prejudice. From 

 the Conquest to the end of the reign of Queen Anne, a period 

 of 648 years, the consumption of rye in England was not less 

 than a third that of wheat, and the dark-coloured bread was the 

 badge of poverty. Rye is not mucJi cheaper than wheat ; the 

 average difference does not exceed five shillings per quarter. 

 But it is exactly these differences which strike the mind of the 

 poor. 



The number of mills in the United Kingdom began to fall 

 from the very first introduction of roller mills, and - it has been 

 estimated that in 1883 there were 12,000 mills ; in other words, 

 ten years' fight with the roller mills had ended in 3,000 mills 

 out of 15,000 going under. Most of them were wind, but some 

 of them were water-mills. 



