The conveyance of cattle by railway reminds us how enormously all the great centres and bee-hives of our population are indebted to the iron road and the iron horse for their daily consumption and sustenance. “Give us this day our daily bread,” is in the prayer that all Christians should offer up, morning and evening, and the railways do give it in a way the stoppage of which for two or three days would cause a famine in the land. Dr. Wynter, in the article “London Commissariat” of his _Curiosities of Civilization_, gives the marvellous statistics relating the daily supplies of food which come to London. But since Dr. Wynter wrote, the population of the Metropolis and of its outskirts has increased a fifth. Yet the great London mouth is fed, and the great London stomach is replenished with the same regularity as ever. As it is with London, so it is with every other concentration of souls in the land. Demand is always increasing, yet supply keeps pace, and never fails to be hand and hand with it. For we have the consolation of knowing that what we are unable to produce at home we have not the slightest difficulty in finding abroad. In addition to the 14,000,000 of cattle of all kinds that are conveyed, last year, from our green pastures to our slaughter-houses, we imported 237,739 oxen, cows, and calves; and as each of these animals, as he or she steps on shore, is, according to Board of Trade computation, worth £18. 14s. 5d., it follows that John Bull has paid for them, in meal or malt, in money or money’s worth, £4,092,941. 790,880 was the number of foreign sheep and lambs that came among us last year; and, as the Board of Trade put a value upon each of them of £2. 10s. in 1865, which value has not been diminished in 1866, the score against us on this account would be, according to arithmetic as practised in the Statistical Department of that branch of public service, £1,504,312; but according to the arithmetic as known elsewhere, it is £1,977,200. The former sum could only be correct if the value were £1. 18s.½d. per head.[24]