A FRUIT-GROWERS' PROTEST.
Crops of gooseberries and currants are likely to be immense. For myself, I never saw gooseberry bushes so laden as on one or two of the Worcestershire farms which I visited last week. The yield is due not only to the season but to very intensive cultivation ; that is to say, expenditure. The fields are not only carefully cultivated ; they are generously manured with artifieials and sprayed many times in winter and spring with various chemicals, most of which are costly, both to buy and to apply. Just as the farmer's heart is cheered by the sight of a crop now past the danger zone, promising him the reward of his heavy expenditure, he hears that British factories have already purchased forward, and therefore without knowledge of its quality, huge quantities of small fruit from Europe. There is, I think, little doubt that the English fruit makes better jam, but for one unessential reason and another, from habit, from a certain convenience, for the sake, perhaps, of secrecy, and because the foreign fruit is a little earlier, a number of manufacturers prefer to buy abroad on speculation before they even know what English supplies will be. They do not even give the English fruit-grower the offer of com- peting. Is this preference for the foreign product due to economic or psychological influences ? The question touches a crucial point.
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