This general fall in prices seems to have been directly connected with the increase of foreign competition.[695] Wheat has been most affected by this development, and at the date of the Commission the home production had sunk to 25 per cent. of the total quantity needed for consumption.  Other home-grown cereals had not been similarly displaced, but the large consumption of maize had affected the price of feeding barley and oats.  As regards meat, while foreign beef and mutton had seriously affected the price of inferior British grades, the influence on superior qualities had been much less marked.  Foreign competition had been, on the whole, perhaps more severe in pork than in other classes of meat, but had been confined mainly to bacon and hams.

The successful competition of the foreigner in our butter and cheese markets was attributed mainly to the fact that the dairy industry is better organized abroad than in Great Britain.

The Commission found that another cause of the depression was the increased cost of production, not so much from the increase of wages, as from the smaller amount of work done for a given sum.  Where wages in the previous twenty years had remained stationary, the cost of work had increased because the labourer did not work so hard or so well as his forefathers.

The following table[696] is a striking proof of the increased ratio of the cost of labour to gross profits: 

Ratio of
Average             cost of
Acreage  Period      Average       annual   Average    labour
of      of        gross      cost of  cost per  to gross
County. farm.   acct.      profit.      labour.     acre.  profits.

L s. d.  L s. d. s. d.  Per cent.

Suffolk   590 1839-43  1,577 13  3    773 11  0    26   2     49.03
1863-67  1,545  0  9    836  9  0    28   4     54.07
1871-75  1,725  0  1  1,026 14  8    35   2     59.48
1890-94    728 10  5    973  1  5    33   0    133.50

On a farm in Wilts., between 1858 and 1893, the ratio of the cost of labour to gross profits had increased from 47.0 per cent. to 88.3 per cent.; on one in Hampshire, between 1873 and 1890, from 44.4 per cent. to 184.3 per cent.; and many similar instances are given, illustrating very forcibly the economic revolution which has led to the transfer of a larger share of the produce of the land to the labourer.

On the other hand, this Commission found, like the last, that the farmer had derived considerable benefit from the decrease in cost of cake and artificial manure, while the low price of corn had led to its being largely used in place of linseed and cotton cakes.

Before leaving the subject of this famous Commission it is well to state the answer of Sir John Lawes, than whom there was no higher authority, to the oft-repeated assertion that high farming would counteract low prices.  ‘The result of all our experiments,’ he said, ’is that the reverse is the case.  As you increase your crops so each bushel after a certain amount costs you more and more ... the last bushel always costs you more than all the others.’  As prices went lower ’we must contract our farming to what I should call the average of the seasons’; and in the corn districts, the higher the farmer had farmed his land by adding manure the worse had been the financial results.[697]