6 



Handling of British Wool. 



Of these totals it may be taken that crossbred wool of the 

 United Kingdom amounted in 1900 to about 90,000,000 lbs., 

 and Australian and River Plate Wool to 262,000,000 lbs., thus 

 showing a competition of imported wool at the rate of nearly 

 3 to 1. These figures, for purposes of close comparison, are 

 reduced to clean scoured wool. 



From this it will be seen that within the memory of many 

 living men the imports of wool from abroad were consider- 

 ably less than our own growth. A glance at the figures for 

 recent years will show that the total import amounts now to- 

 three or four times our own growth. The effect of this upon 

 the course of the market is easy to imagine. 



A great quantity of the wool imported from the colonies 

 and from Buenos Ayres is of a type which will match the 

 produce of almost every English breed. The merino has 

 been crossed with Lincoln, Southdown, and Kent, and 

 in the case of the River Plate large numbers of sheep are 

 being produced annually without any cross whatever. It 

 will be quite plain from this that growers of English wool 

 have to face a vast amount of competition from which they 

 were free a generation ag o, and it is therefore of great import- 

 ance, at this juncture, that producers should exercise the 

 greatest possible care to maintain their product at least on 

 an equality with the imported article, and that there should be 

 no neglect on the part of the home wool grower in getting up 

 his produce in good marketable condition. In former times 

 it was one of the boasts of the wool dealers of this country 

 that our own wool was got up for the market in a manner 

 superior to that of any other country. Numerous Acts of 

 Parliament were passed in order to arrive at this state of 

 perfection, among them being 23 Henry VIII., cap 17, which 

 enacted that " No person shall wind or cause to be wound in 

 any fleece any wool not being sufficiently rivered or washed^ 

 nor wind nor cause to be wound within any fleece clay, lead, 

 stones, sand, tails, deceitful locks, cot's, lamb's wool, nor any 

 other deceitful thing whereby the fleece maybe more weighty 

 to the deceit and loss of the buyer." Sixpence per fleece 

 only was the penalty under the above statute, but this was 

 found an insufficient preventive, and therefore it was enacted 



