Home Produce, Imports, and Consumption of Wheat. 26 1 
some useful and important facts in regard to the home-produce, 
the foreign supph/, and the consumption of wheat — undoubtedly 
the most important staple food of the population of the United 
Kingdom. 
For various reasons it will be convenient to confine the illus- 
trations to the period commencing with the harvest of 1852 and 
ending with that of 1868. Thus, so far as the results in the expe- 
rimental wheat-field supply data for the calculations, the season 
of 1 851 -2 is the first that could be brought under consideration ; 
since, before that date, there was not the perfect uniformity in 
the description and ainount of artificial manures used year 
after year on one and the same plot as there has been from that 
date to the present time. Again, not much before that time 
had producers and importers thoroughly made up their minds 
as to the influence on their relative positions of the changes 
brought about by the establishment of free trade in corn a few 
years previously ; nor, perhaps, had the effects of that great 
change on the consumption of wheat been, much earlier, 
thoroughly established. The year of 1851, indeed, terminated 
a period of lower prices of wheat than have since prevailed. In 
the week ending October 11th, 1850, the Gazette price of wheat 
was 35s. 6d. ; in January, 1854, under the combined influence of 
a previous bad harvest and of war, it reached as high as 835. Sd. ; 
and, during the past summer, the price has been twice as high as 
in the first year of the period selected for our review. In the 
three successive harvest-years (Sept. 1 — Aug. 31) 1860-1, 1861-2, 
and 1862-3, there were imported into the United Kingdom from 
9,000,000 to 10,000,000 quarters of wheat annually ; or, in the 
first of the three, more than, and in the other two nearly, as much 
as, would supply the total flour and bread consumed by one-half 
of the then existing population. In 1854-5 and in 1855-6, on the 
other hand, the imports were only sufficient for the requirements 
of about 17 per cent, of the population. We have also had within 
the period, in 1853 probably the worst harvest since 1816, and 
in 1863 the most productive since 1884." 
Since 1852 the population of the United Kingdom has in- 
creased by about 3,000,000 = about 11 per cent.; and, inde- 
pendendently of this great increase in the actual number of the 
consumers of flour and bread, it is pretty certain that the amount 
consumed per head of the population has also increased : in 
Great Britain, perhaps, more directly as the result of Free Trade 
in corn and the relaxation of many other restrictions on trade 
and commerce ; but in Ireland in a greater degree than in either 
of the other main divisions of the kingdom, as one of the results 
of the much-lessened yield of the potato-crop. 
VOL. IV. — S, S. 2 B 
