population. This, at 5½ bushels per head, is 165,000 qrs. In ten years, at the same rate of progress, that will have swollen to nearly 2,000,000 qrs., and in ten years more to 4,000,000. This would indicate the need of a gradual rise in our foreign imports in ten years, from the present average of 8,000,000 qrs. a-year to 10,000,000, and in twenty years to 12,000,000 qrs. a-year. In one generation more, say thirty years hence the imports will at this rate be more than the home growth, if that should remain at its present point. Our past experience of the readiness with which the volume of foreign wheat has increased with the demand would lead to the conclusion that we need entertain no apprehension on that score. California promises us next year more than 2,000,000 qrs. France alone, by a slight improvement in her husbandry, only so much as would raise her average yield from 15 to 18 bushels an acre, could meet our requirements. And when we consider the extent of rich countries within the wheat region farther east which are scarcely begun to be tapped by the railway system, we must feel that we are yet far from having reached the limit at which a moderate rate of price will bring us sufficient supplies. For wheat, which forms the great staple of the food of civilised man outside the tropics, occupies of all cereals the widest region suited to its cultivation.
The importance of this fact cannot be overrated. If the wheat region had been of small extent the increase of population would have been quickly limited to the food resources of each country. A continued development of mining and manufacturing enterprise in Great Britain would have been impossible. For nothing can be done without bread. Wheat is the common food, the real staff of life. The hardworking poor are far more dependent on and much larger individual consumers of it than the rich. If its price like that of most other commodities had risen, or was likely to rise, with increasing demand, no political foresight, no more equable arrangement of the burden of taxation, no reduction even in public expenditure could have long availed us. But the wheat region has been designed apparently to be co-extensive with the progress of civilised man, and the more regular and extensive the demands upon it the more ready and continuous becomes the supply.
The natural tendency of the gradually falling price of wheat in this country since 1848, has been to diminish the breadth of our own wheat. And the force of that tendency, in spite of the great increase of gold, shows the steadiness of its operation. There has been a yearly increase of consumers, with an increased power and capacity to obtain bread, an increasing ratio in the supply of gold, the representative of its money value; and yet in spate of all that, the price has declined, and the average breadth of wheat grown in
