I myself came off better than most: I had about the fourth of a crop of
pease.
It will be recollected, that, in a manner, all the bacon and pork
consumed in this country (the far largest consumption of meat out of
towns) is, when growing, fed on grass, and on whey or skimmed milk,--and
when fatting, partly on the latter. This is the case in the dairy
countries, all of them great breeders and feeders of swine; but for the
much greater part, and in all the corn countries, they are fattened on
beans, barley-meal, and pease. When the food of the animal is scarce,
his flesh must be dear. This, one would suppose, would require no great
penetration to discover.
This failure of so very large a supply of flesh in one species naturally
throws the whole demand of the consumer on the diminished supply of all
kinds of flesh, and, indeed, on all the matters of human sustenance.
Nor, in my opinion, are we to expect a greater cheapness in that article
for this year, even though corn should grow cheaper, as it is to be
hoped it will. The store swine, from the failure of subsistence last
year, are now at an extravagant price. Pigs, at our fairs, have sold
lately for fifty shillings, which two years ago would not have brought
more than twenty.
As to sheep, none, I thought, were strangers to the general failure of
the article of turnips last year: the early having been burned, as they
came up, by the great drought and heat; the late, and those of the early
which had escaped, were destroyed by the chilling frosts of the winter
and the wet and severe weather of the spring.
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