LETTERS TO THE EDITOR,.
[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often more read, and therefore more effective, than those which fia treble the space.]
THE EMBARGO ON CANADIAN CATTLE.
[To THE aDITOE or THE " SPECTATOR,")
Sze,—There is one feature in this question which seems to be overlooked both by Members of Parliament and by writers in your and other journals. It is that if the importation of Canadian store cattle should become profitable enough to breeders in the prairie provinces to enable them to send any large number to onr ports they will compete with, and reduce the value of, the store- cattle bred in all the poorer, higher farms of the West and North, where owing to soil and climate arable farming is carried on• under difficulties, and where corn is grown mainly for the sake of the straw necessary to winter the breeding cows. From these sources and from Ireland the richer corn-growing farmers of the Eastern Counties have obtained all the store cattle they wanted; not, perhaps, in all years as cheap as they would like, and for a short time during the War at excessive prices, but as they only bought them when they thought they would pay for feeding they were in a better position than the breeders, who are forced to sell what they can neither winter nor fatten.
The margin of profit to the breeders has never been great en the average of years, but as many of them employ little or no labour, and their standard of living is low, they kept going. If their interests are sacrificed to the interests of Canadians, and we continue to admit free of duty the numerous stores bred by our worst enemies in Ireland, we are, in my opinion, destroying the livelihood of a great number of small struggling farmers and crofters, who rarely have any means of making their voice heard on such a question as this, and in the long run the interests of the comparatively small number of feeders who ask for Canadian cattle will suffer when the breeding of English and Scotch stores is crippled by low prices, as it was in the last twenty years of the last century. I am speaking from personal experience of the ranching interest of Alberta in 1893-1895, when I imported the last lot of store sheep that were landed in England, and fed them on farms which I then occupied in Essex and Glovoestershire.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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