PRODUCTION OF ANIMAL FOOD. 385 
“Is it not expedient here to recall that fearful declaration 
made before the Commission of Inquiry of 1851, and quoted 
in page 101 of this work, that when the consumption of meat 
decreases , the mortality increases in an analogous 
PROPORTION ?” 
We have here certainly matter for serious reflection, and 
motives for endeavouring to bring back the production and 
consumption of cattle, that source of public health, to con- 
ditions equitable for all. 
Could agriculture produce meat in a profitable manner, by 
producing more, and at the same time considerably diminish- 
ing the price to the consumer? Certainly yes; but, in my 
opinion, three conditions are necessary, in what relates to 
the butchery of Paris, and these measures would have an 
immediate and decided influence upon the butchery of the 
rest of France, which, without reaching the impositions of 
the Paris butchery, tends to copy its proceedings in its own. 
These three conditions are as follow : 
1st. Free trade for the butchery — that is, competition. A 
vigilant authority may, by measures more efficacious than 
those which now exist, survey more closely the quality of the 
meat. It could not make the matter worse in any case, how- 
ever evidently disposed to do so; for fraud has been intro- 
duced everywhere, and the existing monopoly lives only by 
the violation of the laws and regulations which govern the 
matter. 
2d. The suppression of all the middle-men and all the 
duties which are placed between the producer and the con- 
sumer. Let there be only the butcher, and the municipal 
and abattoir charges, reduced to 5c. or 6c. 
3d. The creation of one market only, within reach of 
Paris, and thereby the suppression of the 8c. or 10c. wdiich 
tax the meat of animals usually driven from Sceaux to 
Poissy, from Poissy to Sceaux, or from Sceaux or Poissy to 
Paris, to the great injury of their health, their weight, and 
the quality of their meat. By this arrangement, again, we 
might look for a more strict and real attention than that 
which a director of abattoir intimated in the follow ing terms 
in the legislative inquiry of 1851: “It is certain that the 
inspection of the markets is completely illusory : for the 
inspectors inspect nothing at all. They do on the market 
just as they please, and the public find in it no guarantee. 
There come animals in the most deplorable condition ; the 
inspectors never see them ; and then even if they did see 
them, it is a question whether they would prevent the sale of 
them ” 
XXXI. 
51 
