496 Twenty Year 6 Changes in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 
grow th of population and of cattle, it is doubly so in the case 
of the United States. There, side by side with an enormous 
augmentation of cattle, we have a phenomenon quite as re- 
markable, and one which puts a somewhat different light on 
the position, in the equally rapid growth of the population. 
The people of the United States, who scarcely exceeded 
5,000,000 when this century opened, must now number little 
short of 60,000,000. The successive census returns illustrating 
this growth up to 1880 show us that the population of the 
United States doubles itself every twenty-five years. The 
figures I have already given make it plain that it is not these 
residents on their own territory who are now the sole claimants on 
the produce of the soil of the United States. J\o inconsiderable 
group of meat-consumers in our own countrj-, in Belgium, in 
Holland, in France, and perhaps even in Germany, partake of 
the produce of American cattle, although some of the latter 
countries have lately closed their ports to the American pig. 
Now it has been pointed out, not only by economists on this 
side of the Atlantic, but by the responsible officials of the 
American Government, that the stock of cattle in the States has 
not gained upon the local population. The figures in the table 
on p. 484 leave the proportion at the present time at just the 
same figure as twenty years ago, or 77 to each 100 persons. 
Indeed the United States cattle stock per 100 persons which 
was 7(3*6 in 1850, and which rose to 81*4 in 1860, neverthe- 
less sank again in 1880 to 71*6, and was estimated in 1885— 
even after a vast amount of British capital had stimulated the 
extension of the ranching industry — at no more than 77 "2, 
or practically the figure which I have used in my table as 
representing the state of matters to-day. 
Speaking at Chicago in the presence of a goodly array of 
" cattle kings," and addressing some of the shrewdest and 
most practical of the men who have made American ranciiing 
what it is, the United States Commissioner of Agricuhure 
(Mr. Colman) two years ago pointed out, without » challenge 
from his audience, what this state of matters meant, and said — 
" In other words, although our cattle have increased in an almost fabulous 
manner, our population has increased with equal rapidity. It is however only 
this new region that has so recently been developed west of the Mississippi 
that has enabled the increase of our cattle to keep pace with the population. 
In the older settled States the agricultural class has not held its own in its rela- 
tion to the other classes of our population ; farms have been divided and sub- 
divided, and cattle raising, and particularly beef-jmxluction, has given way to 
grain raising and to fruit and truck fanning. The efl'ect of this ujwn the 
cattle industry is very remarkable. In 1850 we had in the States east of the 
Mississippi 722 cattle to the thousand inhabitants ; in 1880 we had but 521 
to the thousand. And if we take the oldest settled States, like New York 
