— 40 — keep trading during the past ten yeai's. An attempt to impose oven a trifling small excess of charges on cotton or grain at one distribution point will be taken advantage of by competing points.

Unfortunately, conditions in the Sudan have been little favourable to the introduction of either capital or the resulting competition, and, as the President of the British Cotton Growers' Association was moved to remark, after fourteen years' occupation, there is not a single commercial firm of reputation or standing represented in the country. As early at 1904 the Association requested Messrs.

Carver Bros. & C'o., of Alexandria, to send buyers to the Sudan and establish some definite market. Fixed prices on a very low scale were promised, and until recently furnished an artificial basis of values. Later on, Messrs. Carver & Co.

limited their direct purchases to Tokar, " because the quantity grown in the interior of the Sudan was not important enough." To the present day no cotton market has been organised outside that centre, and the small producer is at the mercy of local banks.

In these circumstances, which appear likely to obtain for an indefinite period, the establishment of an agency in Great Britain to act as a commercial intelligence bureau and assist in the disposal of shipments to the best possible advantage, and at minimum charges, should secure many benefits for, and remove heavy burdens from, the hard-pressed producer in this country.

Restorative Crops and the Livestock Industry.—The introduction of the cotton crop with its glamour of high but elusive profits, has possibly obscured the vital importance of the livestock industry as a means of raising the average returns from agricultural areas, and of ensuring the maintenance or improvement of soil fertility. Eeaction has, however, been marked at more than one centre in the northern provinces, where estate owners are seeking to recoup losses in cotton cultivation with profits secured from the fattening and finishing of livestock. For this purpose lubia and other leguminous crops have been grown no longer as the least expensive system of manuring for cotton, but as bidding fair to rival the latter in revenue production.

That shippers of livestock have availed themselves of every facility offered in the form of cheaper transport rates, would appear from the export schedule, and the growth of trade might well justify an exhaustive enquiry with reference to the problems of breeding, feeding and management. In the case of all classes of exportable stock the exacting conditions obtaining in the Northern Sudan lend importance to such an investigation, the postponement of which is likely to cost the country little less than the extensive adoption of untried systems in field agriculture.

Indirect advantages to be derived from the establishment of the livestock industry as an integral element in local farming may be detected in the distribution of risks over a number of undertakings, a reduction in the monotony of