Twenty Years^ Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 465 
berthy. Of this number, 4 animals died of Quarter 111, and 
another subsequently, though not of the same disease. 
Such an untoward result may, it is hoped, be guarded 
against by greater experience in the manipulatory work. — W. R. 
XXII. — Twenty Years^ Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
By Major P. G. Craigie, Secretary of the Central Chamber 
of Agriculture. 
No single feature of our times is more prominent than the 
growth of international relations and international competition, 
and no one is perhaps more thoroughly convinced of this, for 
no one has felt some of the consequences more severely, than the 
British farmer of 1887. Food it is still as imperative as ever 
for our fellow-subjects to find, but world-wide is now the field 
whence it comes to our markets. If therefore it was once the 
duty and the interest of the farmer to acquaint himself betimes 
with what his neighbours were producing around him, it is not 
less wise for him to ask to-day what is going on in more distant 
climes, and in what precise particulars and from what special 
quarters he must look for the keenest competition. The meat 
producer as well as the wheat grower has in these times to keep 
his eye on the foreign horizon, and he is entitled to claim the 
fullest possible information as to the varying course and current 
of the daily stream of competition from abroad. Some day 
perhaps the English, like other governments, may deem it their 
duty not only to collect, but to digest and explain for the 
farmer's benefit all the facts and figures of the ever-changing 
situation. Till our Agricultural Office, still in embryo, is thus 
fully equipped for service with an "Intelligence Department" 
of its own, it cannot be amiss for private and unofficial observers 
to offer for the guidance of producers such notes as they may 
gather, either from a study of the records of our own and other 
governments, or from the parallel researches of foreign writers. 
At no time has the question of our meat supply been neglected 
in the columns of this Journal. Many warnings have been 
given of new competitive developments, and many incentives 
offered to fresh exertions to meet the ever-growing demands of 
one of the most densely peopled and most conspicuously meat- 
eating populations of the globe. Fifteen years ago, in a valuable 
article which has formed a storehouse of information, and a 
basis for many statistical enquiries into the limits of our own 
