These things being so, a question also inviting consideration arises in relation to the economical management of the national resources. For it is generally understood that every acre of good arable land devoted to the production of grain is capable of becoming the source of a much larger amount of produce of equivalent value as food, than if applied to the feeding of sheep and oxen. In other words, a given area of such land cropped with cereals and legumes, will support a more numerous population than that which can be sustained on pasture land, mostly of inferior quality, devoted solely to the growth of cattle. And for another reason, because the corn-land will also produce, without much extra cost, a considerable quantity of animal food, in the form of pigs and poultry, upon the offal or coarser parts of vegetable produce which are unsuitable for human consumption. Moreover, the animals are useful to a considerable extent to the land, by destroying injurious insect life, and by depositing valuable manure.

But owing to our increasing population, and to the uncertainty of the climate, this country has to purchase every year a large and increasing quantity of corn and flour from foreign countries, while more of our own land is yearly devoted to grazing purposes. The increased import of corn and flour and other agricultural produce by Great Britain during the last twenty-six years (that is, previous to the end of 1895, which is the latest information at present obtainable), is exhibited in the following table:* Consumption of Imported Foods Per Head on Population in the United Kingdom.

* See "Diet in Relation to Age and Activity," where the subject is discussed at length. Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., Paternoster Row. By the Author.

The national resources related to the subject of diet.

Large meat production here causes large import of foreign grain.

At the same time our importation of meat has been enormously increasing during the last ten years. Thus the value of dead meat and of animals has now reached the annual amounts here quoted:

* Statesman's Year Book, 1897, p. 86. And what might be the extra cost of obtaining this supply in time of war? - a contingency we ought seriously to reckon on. We should then, perhaps, draw much more largely than we do at present on the enormous resources which exist on all our shores, referred to in the succeeding paragraph.

+ Statesman's Year Book, 1897, pp. 84 - 86.