114 
Tlic Food of the Peojjle. 
lent, quite IVesb, and free from taint. Two foreign gentlemen 
who were among the guests said, " You are pleased because you 
think that by this means you can bring meat for your working 
classes from Australia ; we see also that, when we give a dinner 
in Paris, we can have a good joint of beef or mutton from 
England." The farmer will not lose the ordinary farm labourer 
and others of the poorer classes as his customers for meat, for 
they are not now his customers. Their hungry stomachs arc 
unacquainted with good English beef and mutton ; and, if they 
can be filled with the produce of Australia and America, so 
much the better for them; and for him, too, for he will gain by 
their better health and strength, and by a consequent diminution 
of his poor-rates. 
Metrojwlitan Markets. — It is well worthy of consideration 
whether, by a better organisation, the producer of meat might 
not receive a larger share than he now receives of the proceeds 
of the sale of his beef and mutton. The difference between the 
price which he obtains for his live meat, and the price which 
the consumer pays to the retail butcher for his joints, appears to 
be greater than the necessities of the case require. Almost every 
butcher in London is an advocate for a single live-meat market 
and a single dead-meat market, in close contiguity: and it is 
admitted that such arrangements are convenient for the London 
butchers. It is also admitted that any arrangements which are 
really inconvenient for the butchers must have a reflex effect on 
their customers : but there is another side to this picture. The 
butcher is not the ultimate producer. What about the interests 
and convenience of the producers of stock, the landowners, and 
the farmers ? Is their convenience, are their interests, on all 
fours with those of the butchers ? Possibly not : and, if not, 
may not those arrangements for a single Metropolitan Market, 
which every butcher prefers, because they give him the command 
of the situation, be calculated to place the producers, the sellers 
of stock, at a corresponding disadvantage, throwing upon them 
the whole of the risks and losses which arise from ignorance of the 
state of the markets on any particular day, and enabling the 
London salesmen and the London butchers to engross the gains 
which depend on a knowledge of its state. It is true that the 
landowners and farmers are scattered all over the country, while 
the salesmen and butchers of London might be covered with 
a handkerchief; but could not the former combine, and act 
in bodies, instead of being utterly isolated, so as to maintain 
their own interests rather better than they are maintained at 
present ? 
In this point of view, as well as in many others, the subject 
of markets is of serious importance to the farmer. It is still 
