Twenty Years' Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 489 
Other rates, like those before quoted for France, have been 
of course proposed as possible, but nothing is more difficult 
to substantiate with any accuracy than a figure of this sort. 
The extreme variety of individual tastes and opportunities, the 
large margin between town and country consumption, so evident 
in countries where the octroi duty enables an estimate of the 
former to be made, and the too frequent want of identity in the 
term vaguelv entered as meat, all conspire to deter the statis- 
tician from much confidence in the matter.* But for the broad 
purpose of this article 1 think I may be allowed to take it that 
1)V common consent we ourselves eat at least a fourth more than 
t:ie most meat-eating of the European States, and twice as much 
as many of those whose herds we have been considering. 
These considerations would, it is true, tell rather in favour of 
there being a surplus of meat for export from the countries 
where relativelv so little is used at home, but I am disposed to set 
off against this possible surplus the slower rate of feeding cattle 
that is usual abroad. Very considerablv less weight of meat will 
be annually available from each 1000 living animals on the 
Continent than is the case here. Although in contrasting one 
country with another, in respect of the head of cattle per 100 
persons, an ox was a unit in either case, however varied the 
meat he represented might be, I do not think we should greatly 
err in considering the smaller consumption more than com- 
pensated for by the larger number of animals required to 
yield the 50, 60, or 70 lb. required for each person. 
I do not desire to give the impression, which would of course 
be erroneous, that there is no considerable trade in live animals 
in Europe other than the imports we ourselves receive. Inci- 
dentally in the case of France 1 have already mentioned that she 
was twice as large a mutton importer as we w"ere. Although 
there was a time, before, for sanitarv reasons, we shut our ports 
against her, when some cattle reached us from France, she too, 
like ourselves, is " on balance " a buyer of cattle reared outside 
her own territory. Thus in the twenty years during which we 
have seen our own live cattle imports rise from 178,000 to 
475,000, and fall again to 318,000, both France and Belgium 
have been importing also. Their margin of imports over ex- 
ports in each year may be traced in the table at the top of p. 490, 
the figures of which are in thousands (" 000 " omitted). 
The better to follow the current of the cattle trade within 
Europe, I extract a series of figures from some tables given 
by Professor Von Xeumann Spallart in his recent valuable work 
* I omit any quotation of the relatively large consnmptioii of cities like Paris, 
Berlin, or London, as those cannot possibly reptesent average rates. 
