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 as the irregularity of employment which depresses the condition of agricultural labourers. That is mitigated by emigration from the agricultural to the mining and manufacturing districts, or to foreign countries. Mere farming will not take up profitably the natural increase of population in a thickly-peopled country like ours, and the purely agricultural districts in each of the three countries are constantly parting with their surplus. The proportion between the producers and consumers of food is thus undergoing a marked change. In 1831, 28 per cent of the population of England and Wales was occupied in the business of agriculture. In 1841 it was 22 per cent. It 1851 it had fallen to 16 per cent., not so much from an actual decrease of the numbers employed in agriculture as from the far greater proportional increase of trade. In 1861 the proportion was 10 pet cent., and then not only had the proportion diminished, but the actual numbers had decreased by one-fifth. It is a very remarkable fact that in the course of a single generation the proportion of the people of England employed in and dependent on agriculture had diminished from a third to a tenth. The only means of arresting this is by providing better-paid and more regular employment in country work, and thus diminishing the temptation of the higher wages of the mines, the factory, and the towns.

Last year I touched on this subject, and mentioned the intention of trying the beetroot sugar growth and manufacture in this country. The experiment was made in Suffolk, and with so much promise of success, that in the same locality this season a sufficient breadth of beet will be planted to keep an extensive sugar factory in full work for the four slack months from October to February. The matter, then, will be beyond experiment, for if it proves, as is anticipated, the suitability of our climate and soil to the profitable production of sugar-beet, it will be the dawn of a new agricultural industry, which may rapidly be developed, to the great benefit both of England and Ireland. The possible magnitude of the result will be readily appreciated by the fact that in this country the consumption of sugar is equal to nearly one-third of all the sugar annually produced in the tropics and on the continent, and that any disturbance which would seriously alter the state of property or labour in Cuba, must give an immense stimulus to the demand for beetroot sugar. And the reduction of price which will follow the "free breakfast table" promised to us by Mr. Bright, as one of the early results of economy in our public expenditure, will rapidly augment that demand.

In a national point of view the introduction of a new