SOO On Cheese-making in Home Dairies and in Factories. 
annually — equal to the manufacture of nearly as many lbs. of 
cheese — a quantity which does not now very much exceed 
that which is at present annually imported from abroad.* 
It must be admitted that the possibility of adding IO5. a 
cwt. to the value of this great manufacture, of taking 2s. 
■or 35. a cwt. from the cost of it, of doing away with the 
labour of some 10,000 dairymaids, and setting them free for 
the wants of other increasingly urgent employment, are most 
important considerations, both socially and agriculturally. It 
is not imagined that the whole of this great industry will ulti- 
mately concentrate and accumulate in factories ; but it seems 
certain that, except where landowners are willing, at consider- 
able expense, to provide the necessary home equipment, the 
course of events must tend that way. The superiority of the 
early and late makes of cheese, where large quantities of milk 
can be dealt with from the beginning till the end of the season 
— the superior quality throughout the year where the manu- 
facture is in the hands of the highest skill assisted by the 
best-arranged contrivance — the diminished cost of manufacture, 
especially in respect of labour — the higher prices that are earned 
per gallon by the factory, are together certain ultimately to have 
this result. 
This is no proposal to place quantities of live-stock under 
central management. Direct ownership, and the constant 
personal anxiety and care which only this will ensure, are 
necessary for the prosperous condition of the live-stock of the 
farm ; its management could not be safely undertaken by a 
company. But it is simply a manufacture that is contemplated, 
in which the end depends upon the behaviour of a raw material 
under the well-known processes to which it is subjected. 
There is nothing whatever in the nature of the subject to take it 
out of the rank of ordinary manufactures — nothing to hinder us 
from anticipating that the greater economy and profit of opera- 
tion on the greater scale, which are always realised in those, 
will be also realised in this. Certainly to anyone who comes 
into the dairy, of say even a 200-acre farm, during the last two 
months of the cheese-making season and sees the little mess of 
curd lying under its cloth in the cheese-tub just ready for the 
press — the whole daily result of all this great apparatus of 
milk-room, cheese-room, boilers, ovens, dairymaids, and what 
not, which has to be maintained — it must seem plain that the 
factory which unites the work of 30 or 40 dairies in a single 
apartment, with one, two, or three hands for the whole of it, must 
ultimately succeed on the score of both economy and profit." 
* Tho import of cliecsc in 1872, 1873, and 1874, was 1,0G0,130, 1,355.267. and 
1, 488, 223 cuts, respectively. 
