section of the population is rapidly
increasing, and consequently is daily augmenting the demand for meat.
The rural population is certainly not increasing; rather the reverse.
Less manual labor is now expended in the operations of agriculture, and
even horses are retiring before the advance of the steam plough. The
only great purely vegetable-feeding class is diminishing, and the upper,
the middle, and the artizan classes--the beef and mutton eating sections
of society--are rapidly increasing. It is clear, then, that we are
threatened with a revival of the pastoral age, and that in one way, at
least, we are returning to the condition of our ancestors, whose staple
food consisted of beef, mutton, and pork.

And here two questions arise. How long shall we be able to supply the
increasing demand for meat? How long shall we be able to compete with
the foreign feeders? These are momentous queries for the British farmer,
and I trust they may be solved in a satisfactory manner. At any time
during the present century the foreign or colonial grower of wheat could
have undersold the British producer of that article, were the latter not
protected by a tariff; but cattle could not, as a general rule, be
imported into Great Britain at a cheaper rate than they could be
produced at home. Were there no corn imported, it is certain that the
price of bread would be greater than it is now, even if the grain
harvests had been better than they have been for some years past. A bad
cereal harvest in England raises the price of flour, but only to a small
and strictly limited extent, because, practically, there is no limit
to the amount of bread-stuffs procurable from abroad. When, on the
contrary, the turnip crop fails, or that excessive drought greatly
curtails the yield of grass, the price of meat and butter increases
greatly, and is but slightly modified by the importation of foreign
stock.

Hitherto the difficulty of transit has been so great that we have only
derived supplies of live stock from countries situated at a short
distance, such as Holstein and Holland. Vast herds of cattle are fed
with but little expense in America, and myriads of sheep are maintained
cheaply in Australia; but the immense distances which intervene between
our country and those remote and sparsely populated regions have,
hitherto, prevented the superabundant supply of animal food produced
therein from being available to the teeming population of the British