government, carried out most judiciously for more
than forty years, to improve the meat-making
live stock of France, have proved, as far as the
peasant proprietor is concerned, of no more
effect than "water poured on sand." The peasant-
proprietor cannot afford to buy, nor to feed, nor
to use a beef-making beast: he wants muscle, not
flesh. As for sheep, he has neither the space
for a crop of roots, nor the money nor the
inclination to find the essential corn or cake for
winter food.

But although, in the absence of complete
agricultural statistics, all the evidence is in
favour of a great increase in the meat-producing
powers of this country, founded on the
increased use of artificial manures, still the fact
remains that the supply is not equal to the
demand created by increased population, and still
more by the improved condition of a population
that expects to eat fresh meat where their fathers,
more poorly clad, were compelled to be
contented with a little bacon, or a little of the
salted beef of a worn-out dairy cow. We are
constantly, so far as London and the great towns of
England are concerned, largely dependent on the
foreigner. Our first foreign supply was drawn
from Northern Europe, from parts of Denmark,
from Germany, and from Holland. Spain and
Portugal sent and send us a limited number of
fat bullocks, magnificent animals, dove-coloured,
meek-eyed, with enormous branching horns—-
chiefly working bullocks, fatted on Indian corn,
producing " meat mottled like marble, and nearly
as hard," cheap, nutritious, and tough, but of
great value for soup and stews, if only our
labourers' wives knew how to cook.

About two years ago the French began to
ship a number of their best oxen to us, chiefly
Normands crossed with short-horns. The year
before the cattle-plague one English cattle-salesman
remitted ten thousand pounds to France,
the purchase-money of fat bullocks for one
season. Sheep came to us from Germany and
Holstein in enormously increasing numbers;
many merinoes, which furnish a large quantity
of small tough joints at a very low price. The
North German exporters, whose centre is
Hamburg, send thousands of excellent animals called
Dutch sheep, which are crosses from good
English Leicester and Cotswold rams. Flocks of
pure and of crosses of Downs are also kept in
the large towns in sandy Prussia. It not
unfrequently happens that one-third of the live
stock exhibited in the metropolitan market is
foreign. At the time the cattle-plague broke
out, railways having been opened up to Eastern
Europe, we had tapped the grassy plains of
Poland and Hungary, and had even one importation
from Russia. Our salesmen were in
communication with the cattle-dealers at Berlin and
Vienna, and the grey cattle with straight long
horns, which are supposed to be the descendants
of Oriental cattle brought by the first Tartar
invasion into Europe, were to be seen in the
streets of London. These were no doubt,
directly or indirectly, the cause of all our woes.

0f the foreign cattle trade, we may say,
paraphrasing a line of one of Horace's most
celebrated odes, " We can neither live with it, nor
without it." All the evidence, British and
foreign, practical and scientific, of Germany, of
veterinaries, and of English sufferers, points to one
short, simple, certain, severe, and somewhat
costly remedy—- a market exclusively reserved
for foreign fat cattle at every port of debarkation,
where every animal intended for the
butcher should be slain, after sale, in public
abattoirs provided for the purpose; and a
quarantine-ground, with ample grass lairs for
dairy cows and stores, to be retained for
not, less than fourteen days after landing.
This is the opinion of the commissioners,
who minutely investigated the whole subject,
and to this solution public opinion is rapidly
tending. It must be admitted that such
an arrangement would add something to the
price of every foreign beast, and be very
unpopular with butchers. The most
advantageous way in which cattle can be
disposed of for beef, if there were no such
thing as an infectious disease, is, that they
should be sold in a convenient open market,
taken home by the butcher, killed as near his
shop as possible (when wanted, and not before)
in a well-constructed slaughter-house, so that
being able to make the very best price of the
hide, horns, blood, fat, and other uneatable
offal, and to cool the meat in the best manner,
he may lose as little as possible, and may
therefore be able to bring down the average
price of every pound of meat.

But some tax must be paid by the butcher
first, and his customers the public afterwards,
to ensure us against the recurrence of a calamity
that has already cost us three million sterling
in stock destroyed, besides the resulting
increased price of meat. A foreign cattle market
in London would encroach on the monopoly of
the Corporation and its single market—- it would
give trouble to the live-stock salesman by
making another market-day—- it would interfere
with the monopoly of the dead-meat salesman of
Newgate and Leadenhall markets, and it would
somewhat affect the profitable disposal of the
eatable offal, from which, when retailed at the
butchers' shops, the poorer classes of the metropolis
get a large supply of cheap and wholesome
food. But great evils require severe remedies.
Therefore, and very soon, on the Thames and on
the Humber a foreign live-cattle market must be
established, as far as possible from the market
for British live stock. Thus the home trade
will be made free, and the importation of live
foreign stock, bringing their valuable hides,
blood, fat, and offal for the employment and
food of the labourers of London, will be
encouraged.

But cattle-market reform must not stop here.
The metropolis, with its three millions of inhabitants,
is, for all the purposes of supply, not one,
but several towns. A single central dead meat
market is a mistake. We need at least three
new meat markets, one on the north-west, to be
fed by the northern and western railways with