The mutton-sheep has come to stay, because we are fast getting to be a mutton-eating people. Despite the enormous increase in population, fewer cattle and hogs are being slaughtered to-day than twenty years ago, while the number of sheep killed has more than doubled in the same period. In 1880, for every sheep slaughtered at the Chicago stock-yards, four heads of cattle and twenty-one hogs were killed. In 1900 the number of sheep received at the stock-yards exceeded that of cattle, and in 1911, for every sheep slaughtered, there was only one half of a beef carcass and one and one quarter of a hog. The rapid increase in the demand for and supply of sheep out of all proportion to other animals is in itself the best refutation of the cry that sheep-growing is unprofitable. In his recent book on “Sheep Breeding in America,” Mr. Wing, one of the foremost authorities on the subject in this country, who investigated the sheep-breeding industry for the Tariff Board in every part of the country where it is carried on, as well as abroad, says that sheep-breeding is profitable despite the woefully neglectful manner in which it is conducted in the United States. Unlike some United States senators who have grown rich in the business of raising sheep, Mr. Wing remains cheerful at the prospect of a reduction of wool duties, and even their total abolition has no terrors for him. His attitude is very significant, when it is considered that he is a practical sheep-grower, still engaged in that business, in addition to writing on the subject, and that all his interests, both business and literary, are intimately wound up with the sheep industry. Not all growers, it is true, have adopted modern methods. The report of the board shows five additional groups of farmers whose cost of production of wool varies from less than five cents a pound to more than twenty. Accepting these figures at their face-value, although they are only approximate, and assuming that a raw material like wool of which we cannot produce enough to satisfy our needs is a proper object of protection, the question still remains whether the tariff is to be high enough to afford protection to every man in the business, even when the results obtained by his neighbors show that he has his own inefficiency or backwardness to blame for his high costs, or whether the duty is to measure the difference between the cost of production of our efficient producers and that of their foreign competitors. If the former be taken as a standard, then the present duty on raw wool is not sufficiently high, and should be greatly increased; if the latter be accepted as a basis in tariff-making, then, there being no cost in raising wool on up-to-date American ranches, there seems to be no valid reason for any duty, except possibly one of a transitory nature, to allow sufficient time to the sheep-growers who need it to adjust themselves to modern conditions of business. MILL EFFICIENCY