472 Twenty Years' Clianges in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
millions of souls. This is a rather remarkable discovery, since, 
if interpreted literally, it would mean that while we relied 
twenty years ago upon the foreign producer for the meat supplies 
of just 8 per cent, of our population, or rather less than one man 
in twelve, we are now relying on external aid for the supplies of 
over 27 per cent., or more than one man in four. There is, 
however, a complication which forbids us to use the figures 
exactly as they stand. It is not, it appears, the case that the 
average Briton of 1887 consumes just the same ration of meat 
as his predecessor of 1867. The remark is one of the most 
ordinary commonplace character, but the fact is indisputable. 
It is equally obvious to any careful observer of the social habits 
of all classes in the country, and to the calculator who arrives 
at the same result by patient arithmetical investigation. If 
45,000 tons kept a million persons supplied with their average 
wants in the way of meat twenty years ago, I believe all the 
evidence points to something nearer 49,000 tons as necessary 
for the same purpose now. At this larger rate, perhaps we may 
take it without exaggeration that 9,300,000 residents in the 
United Kingdom are at this moment fed from the meat of other 
lands than ours. Our own supplies, therefore, although actually 
greater in bulk, do not now suffice to keep as many of Her 
Majesty's subjects as they did twenty years ago, and the farmer 
has failed from some cause or other to feed a single one of the 
new mouths which have opened around him. 
Thus far I have spoken of imported meat without distinguish- 
ing the several varieties of form in which we consume the 
produce of foreign oxen, sheep, or swine. But a very little obser- 
vation will make it plain that the supplies which the foreigner 
sends us in such abundance are not divided at all in the same 
proportion as is our home produce, or our ordinary consumption. 
The competition is consequently keener in some descriptions 
of meat than in others, and no enquiry will help us to under- 
stand our true position, or enable us to discover the feasibility 
or otherwise of any extension of our own meat manufacture, 
which does not attempt a closer scrutiny of the nature and 
sources of the competition we are striving to meet. 
There is an initial difficulty in the analysis I propose, because 
our Customs House authorities, whose courtesy in placing 
official information at my disposal I am glad to acknowledge, 
do not in their returns distinguish between what is beef and 
what is mutton in the so-called unenumeratcd meat imports. 
These include the portion which comes here closed against 
inspection as tinned provisions. 
The precise dimensions of the several classes of our import 
trade at the present time, and the proportion of the unenume- 
