veal that is sold so cheap in some distant
counties at present bears little other resemblance than the name, to
that which is bought in London. Formerly, the price of butchers, meat
would not pay for rearing, and scarcely for feeding, cattle on land
that would answer in tillage; but the present price will not only pay
for fatting cattle on the very best land, but will even allow of the
rearing many, on land that would bear good crops of corn. The same
number of cattle, or even the same weight of cattle at the different
periods when killed, will have consumed (if I may be allowed the
expression) very different quantities of human substance. A fatted
beast may in some respects be considered, in the language of the French
economists, as an unproductive labourer: he has added nothing to the
value of the raw produce that he has consumed. The present system of
grating, undoubtedly tends more than the former system to diminish the
quantity of human subsistence in the country, in proportion to the
general fertility of the land.

I would not by any means be understood to say that the former system
either could or ought to have continued. The increasing price of
butchers' meat is a natural and inevitable consequence of the general
progress of cultivation; but I cannot help thinking, that the present
great demand for butchers' meat of the best quality, and the quantity
of good land that is in consequence annually employed to produce it,
together with the great number of horses at present kept for pleasure,
are the chief causes that have prevented the quantity of human food in
the country from keeping pace with the generally increased fertility of
the soil; and a change of custom in these respects would, I have little
doubt, have a very sensible effect on the quantity of subsistence in
the country, and consequently on its population.

The employment of much of the most fertile land in grating, the
improvements in agricultural instruments, the increase of large farms,
and particularly the diminution of the number of cottages throughout
the kingdom, all concur to prove, that there are not probably so many
persons employed in agricultural labour now as at the period of the
Revolution. Whatever increase of population, therefore, has taken
place, must be employed almost wholly in manufactures, and it is well
known that the failure of some of these manufactures, merely from the
caprice of fashion, such as the adoption of muslins instead