Some curious innovations in farming practice are advocated in these German farming talks, Much emphasis is laid on the breeding of [small animals, especially rabbits and beavers, which can make good use of waste food material- and which yield valuable fur and flesh. About an acre of ground will, it is said, keep 200 to 300 beavers, and they are content with an artificial pond. Hemp is recommended as a suitable crop for almost worthless fields which would give only a poor yield of beet or rye. One grower said that he had 300 acres of hemp last year and that with guaranteed prices the the latest survey, the eleventh in the annual series, conducted by Sir Kindersley.
This was despite certain mitigating circumstances, such as forward com-entered inia by producers cumstances in the current year and it is a moot point whether the more recent rise in commodity prices can have served to redress its effect on this year's income, states "The Times" of December 16, Repatriation of Capital further repatriation of capital, continuing the movement which, save for 1983 and 1934, has been in progress 1 Stace 1931, took place during 1938, repayments to this country exceeding new oversea issues by £10,000,000, and the nominal value of the total investments in quoted and unquoted securities, Sir Robert reckons, declined by £61,000,000 to £3,692,000,000. Incidentally he enters a reminder that 70 per cent, of these investments and concludes "that few, if any, of these securities have a ready market outside the United Kingdom."
Few, if any, seems rather sweeping, but it is as well that it should be recognized that the total of liquid foreign assets which might be mobilized or the possible finance of the war is something considerably smaller than the total of British oversea investments, In this connexion it is interesting to note that Mr. Keynes in the promised estimate of what he calls the "i and fiscal potential of Great Britain," which he now gives in the December "Economic Journal," puts such assets at not less than £1,- 000,000,000.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.