686 Agricultural Depression at Home and Abroad. 
“ bad times” affecting all industries, and free imports of live- 
stock, corn, and other products, while Belgian exports were 
taxed heavily. Recent Consular reports do not give information 
upon the subject ; but the imports of grain have greatly in- 
creased, and the state of agriculture must be worse than it was 
in 1886 in consequence of the fall in prices that has taken place 
since that year. 
Apart from those engaged in co-operative dairying, Mr. 
Drage reports, agriculturists of every class in Denmark are 
feeling the results of long-continued depression. Even this 
exception is a doubtful one at the present time, as the Danish 
butter-makers are now feeling seriously the rapidly extending 
competition of Australia and New Zealand in British markets. 
Some months ago a sum of money was voted by the Danish 
Government for opening up a butter trade in Paris, on account 
of the unsatisfactory prices current in England and the prob- 
ability of further reduction. But the co-operative system of the 
Danish dairy-farmers, extended as it is to disposal of their pro- 
duce in this country, enables them to reap a profit where makers 
who operate chiefly to the advantage of middlemen would fail. 
They are also helped greatly by the remarkably successful 
operation of their Margarine Act, passed in 1891, which is the 
best in the world ; and in everything that can conduce to the 
advantage of agriculture the Danish Government has long shown 
an enlightened interest. 
Sweden has probably suffered less from agricultural depres- 
sion than most countries. About half of her four million acres of 
corn consists of oats, which, until this year, had fallen less in 
value than other cereals, while the area under wheat is only 
about 170,000 acres. The great advance in her dairy export 
trade, too, of which so much has been written, has helped to 
counteract the fall in the prices of grain. Like Denmark, how- 
ever, Sweden felt the fall in the price of butter during last 
winter, occasioned by the great imports of that article from 
Australasia. 
In Norway, according to Mr. Drage’ s report on that country, 
the present condition of the peasant proprietors gives rise to the 
gravest apprehensions. In a debate in the Storthing last year 
it was stated that the cultivators of the soil were falling more 
and more deeply into debt, their mortgage indebtedness having 
risen from nine or ten million pounds sterling in 1865 to nearly 
twenty-eight millions in 1893, while their total indebtedness 
was estimated in the latter year at thirty-six to thirty-nine mil- 
lions — an enormous sum in so poor a country as Norway. In 
reality, it was said, the real owners of the soil were the Bank of 
