466 Twenty Yeari Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
production, the late Sir Henry Thompson,* recurring to the 
older counsels he had offered in 1858, maintained that our grass 
lands " if properly managed would be easily able to meet the 
demand made upon them for an increased production of meat, 
even if the supply required were greatly in excess of the present 
rate of consumption." Either his advice was not taken, or his 
prophecy was founded on insufficient premises, or the remarkable 
reduction in the cost of transit and the collapse of prices gene- 
rally have upset the data on which this forecast was founded. 
Never perhaps has the fame of England stood higher for the 
class of live-stock she produces. No country has furnished so 
large a yearly supply of meat from the stock maintained. Yet 
we have not by any means kept pace in this country with the 
additional number of mouths to be fed. 
We have not even provided the additional number of pounds 
per head which would have sufficed for our earlier population 
had it remained stationary. There was, I believe, in the 
aggregate rather more meat produced at home in the year 
1886 than was the case in 1871, but the increase is a very slight 
one. We are often reminded that neither the considerable ex- 
tension in area of our grass lands, nor the facilities for the wider 
purchase of extraneous feeding stuffs, have secured for us the 
independence inculcated by Sir Henry Thompson's article. 
In these times of trade depression, the commonest complaint 
of the British manufacturer is that he cannot find new markets as 
he once did for that which he produces. Commercial geography 
is his newest study, by the light of which he searches for fresh 
customers at the ends of the earth. Now the manufacturer of 
butcher's-meat, for meat-making is assuredly a manufacture, has 
at hand and day by day a ready-made and always extending 
market opened, simply in the growth of our home population. 
Every day that passes finds him more than one thousand new 
mouths to fill, if he is prepared to fill them. Surely then it is worth 
asking if we have reached the limit of profitable meat-jnaking, 
and who are the competitive producers that step in and appro- 
priate this spontaneously opened trade at our own doors. 
Eminently timely is the enquiry what are the special forms 
and the precise degree in which foreign meat displaces our own, 
and whether not the frequent and striking changes, alike in the 
origin, the volume, and the character of the competition, afford 
us any grounds to determine whether this supplanting of our 
produce is to go on extending or contracting, whether it is to be 
permanent or temporary. 
In a subject so wide, and where so many figures are neces- 
' Journal,' vol. viii., Second Series, p. 152. 
