Smithfield Show at Baker Street Bazaar - Entrance of Fat Sheep

THE ILLUSTRATED  LONDON  NEWS  No. 241.-VOL. IX.].

THE CATTLE SHOW.

FOR THE WEEK ENDING SATURDAY, DECEMBER 12, 1846.

The live in a world of contrasts, not the least of which is that presented at this time between Baker- street and the county of Tipperary. In one place, there is a deficiency of food; in the other, a superabundance of it: here, we have the fat kine of Pharaoh's dream; there, the leanness of actual fa- mine. It is not to denounce or scold that we notice the difference between place and place, or to extract from it, a great social wrong. If the Royal and noble competitors had never expended an ounce of oil-cake on their stock, the relative conditions of the two countries would have been much the same. The Baker- street Exhibition is the product of great wealth turned into an experimental channel; It is something beyond the power of ordinary men with ordinary means to produces it is a collection of agricultural luxuries-a something more than is strictly necessary-a showing of what can be done rather than of what it is a general thing to do. The same wealth that sails yachts and runs race-horses, is applied to developing oxen, sheep, and pigs, to the utmost degree of obesity of which they are capable. There may be an advantage in know

GIANT HORSE  [SIXPENCE.

cates of sumptuary laws of any kind: we wish all the world could dress in silks and diamonds, and feed on prize Turtle (if there should ever be such a thing), washed down with Bargundy. If people have the means, and choose to pay for the éclat of eating strawberries when strawberries are impossible things, they have a perfect right to do so. They employ those who grow them, and feed others in gratifying themselves. Wealth, in every form of expenditure, is the spring of labour; when the rich cease to be rich, it has generally been found that the poor do not get what the wealthy lose. The whole bulk of a nation sinks or falla together; the Spanish nobility were once the richest in Europe; they are now the most decayed; the mass of the Spanish people are lower in the scale of nations than they were in the seventeenth century.

ing of what the animal structure is susceptible; but it is obvious that much of the accumulated bulk is an excess of flesh produced at greater cost than the rate of the market could realise. If nothing came to Smithfield under the Baker-street standard of weight and girth, it is evident that London would be destitute of ribs and steaks, just as omnibus proprietors could not afford to convey the public by blood horses at a penny a mile. For common practical purposes, we must in all cases be content with something less than the very best it is possible by great cost and effort to obtain. Lincolnshire itself, though there is there "much land, and fertile," could not make a paying business of experiments in fat, which would make one ox as dear as five. So farmers confine themselves to what is moderate and profitable; the occupation of feeding for That this has not much to do with the Baker-street Cattle Show, prizes seems to be falling exclusively into the hands of Dukes and Earls; the farmer is willing to let the honour alone, there being must be granted; but it has with the expenditure, and application such things as poor-rates and rents. The Nobleman can afford a of wealth, on which there is much erroneous philosophy afloat; fancy; and whether it is the purchase of a Titian, or the produc- satirists wax wroth at the "contrasts" of society; they are indig- tion of a prize bullock, it is more a matter of taste and inclination nant at the thought that there lie millions of gold in the vaults of than anything else; it is another way of spending money-that is the Bank of England, and that there should be hunger and naked- all. We look on the Smithfield Club Cattle Show as remarkable, ness in St. Giles's. But the remedy is less easy to suggest; it is astonishing, even, in its way; but if it were to be exten- not in a mere distribution of that wealth, for, if it were done, a short sively imitated, there would be consternation in Newgate time would see the old process going on again. So, if the present Market. London could never wait for the termination of well-filled cattle-stalls were empty, and no single Peer had conde- the long process that ends in such quadrupedal pheno-scended to let his talk be of bullocks, the peasant would not be by mena. Covent Garden often sees horticultural marvels; a meal or a shilling the better off; nay, by so much as his parti- legumes strangely out of season, and fruit of gigantic measure cular labour has been wanted in the expanding process, he has been ments; but the mass of society decline green peas when they are at benefited. The Cattle are fatter than necessary, and have doubt- a guinea the pint, are content with gooseberries that can be put less cost more than need be; but the labourer has sustained no into mouths of the usual size, and, in short, buy their vegetable injury from it; he has ministered to a caprice, perhaps; but, at all supplies just as nature and the market-gardeners produce them. events, it is a very harmless one. There is, no doubt, some advantage to be derived from the excep tions; it would be a calamity if there were no wealth that could be spared for anything beyond the mere necessaries: we are no adro

JEMMS

In fact, it is not as a commercial matter that these extraordinary displays can be considered; if Lords graze and feed cattle, they are not wholly grasiers and butchers; if it were a mere question of

BELTON COALME

[COUNTAT EDITION].

THE SMITHFINED CLUB CATTLE SHOW-ARRIVAL OF FAT SUKET AT THE BAZAAR.-(SEE PAGE 375.)