474 Twenty Years Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
Grouped therefore in this fashion, we avoid the excessive and 
to some extent accidental augmentations or declines of imports 
in particular years, and can read in a fairly accurate manner the 
changes in the aggregate supplies. Foreign beef which was 
once supplied us, as to four pounds out of every five, exclusively 
in the shape of live cattle imports, now comes to us in quantities 
nearly three times as great as twenty years ago, but over a third 
of the whole is in the form of dead meat ; while if we could 
classify the contents of the multitudinous tins, which account for 
so large a proportion of the unenumerated imports excluded from 
the above table, we might not improbably find little short of 
another 20,000 tons of beef, which would bring the total up to 
over 170,000 tons in the latest period. 
Largely as our cattle imports have lately developed, we had 
still at the end of last year to thank the foreigner only for the 
equivalent of 8i lb. of beef per head. In bacon and pork the 
increase is much greater. Twenty years ago a smaller quota 
than of foreign beef, or somewhat below 3 lb. per head, was the 
contribution of the pigs of other nations to our breakfast and 
dinner tables. This quota of 3 lb. of foreign pig-meat has 
grown to nearly five times what it used to be, or to one of no 
less than 14 lb. per head. The recent average of 224,000 
tons of pig-meat forming the last item of the above table, or 
the 230,000 of the single year 1886, is now very nearly ton 
per ton equivalent to the estimated outcome from our entire 
stock at home. In no other department of animal food, at all 
events, does the foreign farmer not merely supplement the 
home supply, but actually provide a nearly equal portion with 
our own of the entire quantity consumed on these islands. 
In the last complete year, 1886, less than 1000 tons of the 
total pig-meat imports of 229,500 tons came in the shape of live 
animals, and these mainly from Holland. Another small section 
of fresh pork is now imported, about 4000 tons, of which 
practically two-thirds come from Holland, and one-third from 
Belgium. Of the remaining 225,000 tons, more than two- 
thirds were bacon, and 4 lb. out of every 5 lb. of bacQn came 
from America, the United States sending us ten times as much 
as Germany or Canada. Indeed, there are but a few other 
countries that need be named as engaged in competition with 
our pig-owners, as the following rough analysis on page 475, 
given in thousands of tons to one place of decimals, will 
suffice to show. 
These figures tell their own tale of whence the pig-meat 
comes, and of the form in which it reaches us. The past 
development and future prospects of the great American trade 
in what is called on the other side of the Atlantic " hog-pro- 
