The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-04-30 00:00:00

AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL COMPE-
TITION.

On the above subject The Times has published the fol-

lowing letter :

desire to call attention to an article in
Frazer's Magazine for March on American competition
and our agricultural depression, which I think may
be studied with advantage and reliek- by all timid
landowners and tenant-farmers of thiscountry who
fancy that the sun of their prosperity has set for ever.
The present moment seems not unsuitable for calmly
weighing the balance of evidence therein adduced in
favour of the theory that average British weather
is all that is required to enable the British
farmer to hold his own against foreign competition;
for, notwithstanding the severe winter and late
spring, farmers may at this moment be congratulated
upon their prospects. The seed is not only in the
ground, but has been got in under the most favour-
able conditions. Sunshine in May is all the young
plants need, and meteorologists encourage us to
expect it. Fat cattle maintains its price, and there
is a larger head of cattle in the country than there has
been for several years; while the undoubted failure
in sheep on most cold arid wet, though fortunately by
no means on all, soils, with perhaps an occasional
over-draft at his banker's, is all that remains to
remind the British farmer of the damp and dismal
years he has gone through.
Those who dread American competition omit from
their calculations several factors that must come to the
aid of the British farmer in the course of time—in may
opinion, much sooner than is generally supposed. I
refer to the growth of American and Canadian popu-
lation, their own home requirements and the
exhaustion, not indeed of the soil itself, but of its
virgin characteristics, that enable it to grow successive
crops of wheat without artificial aid or stimulus in the
shape of costly phosphates.
Now, first as regards the growth of population. I
know it is said that production will outstrip popula-
tion, and the case may be proved on paper; in reality,
however, it is more than doubtful if this will prove
true on a large scale. Mr. Stephen, the able and
energetic pioneer of the Canadian Pacific Railway,
points to the 25,000,000 acres along his contemplated
line, and only asks for hands to cultivate them. No
doubt that country will fill up and grow wheat, but it
will be found on further examination that much of
this land cannot be annually relied upon. Some of it
requires dry years and some of it wet ones, Then the
emigrant will have locusts and fires to contend against
in summer, and an almost Arctic winter. When it
becomes necessary to resort to manures, what will
happen? It is not represented as a stock-bearing country,
that is to say, you cannot winter stock out of doors—
in other words, you must have buildings, covered
yards turnips, and all the expensive paraphernalia of
British husbandry, until the tenant's capital will
practically limit the cultivable area. All this time
not only will the number of mouths to feed be growing,
at a normal, or rather an abnormal rate, being placed
under very favourable conditions; but the population
will literally be rolling up, at compound interest rate,
under the action of State-aided emigration, probably
no longer only from Europe, but also from the Eastern
and first settled States of America, in some of which
the population is already as dense as in Great Britain.
Then it requires no prescience or second sight to
foretell the by no means distant day when the full-
fledged society of those remote regions will make the
acquaintance of financiers and of the tax-gatherer.
They will have their income-tax, their local rates,
their death duties, and their debts, if not for wars, at
any rate for public works undertaken in the develop-
ment of the country, just the same in point of fact as
ourselves. Nor does it require the gift of prophecy
to figure to oneself how rapidly those western farmers
will look to obtaining high prices for their produce
by the simple artifices of holding and "corners."
Then, again, we may be sure that the landowners of
that future wheatfield will before long be looking for
rents; that land, now to be bought at two dollars an
acre, will be continually changing hands at higher
prices, and that the interest of capital, invested or
held in the shape of land, will naturally gradually
assume the aspect of rent, and greatly augment the
price of production.
It is, however, quite impossible within the scope of
a letter, or even of a magazine article, to do justice to
a matter of this complexity. Its ramifications are
untold, and cross and recross the Atlantic in every
direction. For example, the British farmer may
fairly look forward to very great advantage in
the future from the importation of lean young
stock from America, and thenceforward divide with
the butcher the profits now realised on American
beef. We shall shortly know the rate of increase
of the population of our own country during the last
ten years, as we now know its increase in wealth.
The Board of Trade tells us that during that period
deposits in the Bank of England increased from 22
to 39'millions, and savings banks deposits from 51 to
76 millions, while pauperism decreased 19 per cent.
These figures are more elequent than words and so
long as facts like these can be recorded, neither the
British farmer nor his landlord need despair of
better times, provided the Gulf Stream is not diverted
and that we know how to adapt ourselves to the
altered requirements of British agriculture' and how
to impart increased energy to production by giving
legislative facilities for the sale of heavily mortgaged,
entailed, or settled estates, the wide extension of the
fee simple, the progressive increase in the number of
landowners, and the consequent investment of more
capital in the cultivation of the soil.—l remain, Sir,
yours faithfully, THURLOW.
42, Upper Grosvenor-street, London, April 22.