500 Report of the Senior Steviard of Live Stock at Newcastle. 
regard to the far higher rate of American meat consumption 
and to the condition of the Eastern States now, it will re- 
quire nothing like as dense a population as Europe supports 
to effectually fill the country, so far as its normal and natural 
means of production are concerned. Hardly then need we 
consider whether or no the America of the future is to guarantee 
us in perpetuity that 800,000 tons of meat, at which some of 
her prominent citizens have been good enough to estimate our 
permanent European deficit. 
Nor can I think that a consideration of the simple figures of 
the situation now, which is all I can pretend to offer, gives us any 
reason to modify the opinion which Mr. John Clay expressed in 
his Report to the Duke of Richmond's Commission on Agri- 
cultural Depression, that in the long run the British farmer need 
hardly fear, in the matter of meat supply, American'competition. 
We should do well, when we note the landing in the JNIersey of 
shiploads of American cattle, or ponder the relatively heavy 
arrivals of American beef, to remember that it was pointed out 
in that Report that " on the very best grazing lands of America 
it will take more than two acres to do the work of one at home, 
while out on the prairie on the arid plains of Colorado and 
Wyoming it will often require the grass product of 50 to 100 
acres to keep an animal, while in good wild land it is estimated 
that a steer will need 10 to 15 acres to carry it through the 
year." If this be so, and those acres are by common consent 
allowed to be becoming too narrow for the hards that now graze 
them, surely the next change in the sources of foreign meat 
competition will be the gradual elimination of America, just 
as we have seen the gradual elimination of Europe from 
the category of dangerous competitors with the grower of 
English beef. 
XXIII. — Report of the Senior Steicard of Live Stock at New- 
castle. By the Earl OF COVENTRY, Croome Court, 
Worcester. 
The forty-eighth annual show of the Royal Agricultural 
Society of England was held in July 1887, at Newcastle-on- 
Tyne. History repeats itself, for upon two previous occasions, 
namely in 1846 and in 18G4, the Society had visited New- 
castle. A sufficient length of time has elapsed between the 
meetings to enable us to mark the changes which have taken 
place in these gatherings ; and it will be interesting to all of 
us, and especially to those who may have been present at the 
