Fifty Years 1 Progress of British Agriculture. 
29 
wheat-growing in the United States of America. They had 
productive years when the crops were deficient here. In a 
single year they increased their wheat acreage by an extent 
equal to our total growth. In the twenty years from 18G0 to 
1880 their production of wheat rose from twenty to sixty 
million quarters. They could not have found an outlet for it 
but for the most rapid increase of railroad communication with 
which it was accompanied, and the increased demand from 
Western Europe. The cost of transport fell from twopence per 
ton per mile to a farthing. The distance from which wheat 
could be conveyed was thus increased eightfold. And as a ton 
of meat or provisions is six times the value of a ton of corn, and 
as these are yielded by the land in about that proportion, the 
produce of six acres in the form of meat or provisions can be 
transported as cheaply, so far as weight is concerned, as that of 
one acre of corn. This formidable and growing competition in 
both corn and provisions we must now reckon with. 
The long-continued period of bad crops and low prices, 
added to the losses of live stock, especially sheep, in the wet 
cold seasons by disease, had reduced the capital of the farmers 
in this country by 30 to 50 per cent, when the collapse of prices, 
beginning in 1875, fell upon them. Their gradual but growing 
poverty had for several years forced them to discontinue outlays 
in the maintenance of the condition of their farms. The poor 
clay lands are going out of cultivation. In the corn counties 
much of the land is in this position, and considerable tracts 
being without tenants are farmed by the landowners. Large 
reductions of rent have been made, and where land has from 
any cause been pressed for sale, the price has fallen greatly. 
At no period of the existence of the Royal Agricultural Society 
has there been such depression in the interests of agriculture 
as now prevails. 
On the other hand, never has there been a time in which 
every article of food has been so plentiful and cheap. In the 
earlier years of the Society's existence the home and foreign supply 
of wheat was in the proportion of two-thirds home-grown and 
one-third foreign. In 1851 the whole supply afforded 317 lb. 
per annum to each of a population of '27,000,000, which at the 
average price of the previous ten years of protective duties 
amounted to 53,500,000?. But the total supply of 1889 gave 
400 lb. per head to a population of 37,500,000 at a cost of 
43,700,000?. Not only were our people, 10,500,000 increased 
in number, fed with bread at a diminished yearly cost of nearly 
10,000,000?. sterling, but each individual had an additional 
supply of one-fourth beyond that of 1851. 
