Twentf Years^ Chavges in our Foreign Meat Supplies. 499 
Montana on to the newer grassy slopes of the foot-hills of the 
Rockies in the Canadian province of Alberta. 
It is small wonder, then, that men have begun to question the 
claims of extreme expansiveness which have been put forward 
on behalf of the wide prairies of the West. The buffalo is gone, 
and the ox has taken his place ; but where the migratory buffalo 
was wont only to find a sustenance from the grass of the plains at 
certain seasons of the year, the ox is expected to find it, and to 
get fat on it, all the year round. If, therefore, these be signs 
that the business is already overdone, where indeed are we to 
1 look for the 70,000,000 cattle the Americans will want by the 
\ close of this century, or the 140,000,000 they will need by 1930 ? 
That some very considerable check has occurred, and that in 
some of the most rapidly advancing cattle districts of Wyoming 
or Montana, it seems impossible to doubt. I am tempted, with- 
out laying too much stress on isolated instances or particular 
districts, to quote the current stories of ranches claiming last 
year 1800 head of cattle, and branding this summer only 
36 calves. Speaking more generally of Central and Northern 
Wyoming, the " calf-crop " of 1887 has been asserted to be but 
one-fifth of that of 1886, and the losses of the winter in cows 
and in " pilgrim " stock driven into the country from south and 
east excessive. 
I might of course multiply such statements to any extent, but 
I my object will be served if I can establish the fact that enough has 
happened to make us see that we shall err if we look for a long 
and certain continuance of ever-developing herds on the prairies 
of the West, and ever-extending competition either in cattle or 
in cattle products from the United States. 
It is difficult for us here to realise how rapidly the settlement 
of even the vast area of the great republic is going on. In 
his Presidential Address to the Royal Statistical Society in 
1 1882, Mr. Giffen argued from the records of population in- 
creases in the States, that an addition of 25 millions to the 
rural population would suffice to occupy all the available area 
in the same way that the oldest and most settled States of the 
Union are now occupied. By the year 1900, distant only 
thirteen years from the time where we stand, as near to us, if I 
may put it that way, as 1874, he calculates that Kentucky, 
Tennessee, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Arkansas, 
Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, will be filled 
up with a population as dense as that of the original States. 
In ten years more we may see the Western States and territories 
levelled up by the addition of enough inhabitants "to fill the 
jvacuum." 
However this may be, there is little doubt that, having 
VOL. XXIII. — S. 8. 2 L 
