TRADE IN TRIFLES.
It takes about a billion and a half of eggs every year to supply the demand in Great Britain and Ireland, besides all the eggs that are produced there. Forty per cent of the eggs consumed in the United Kingdom are brought from twenty different foreign lands, including several of the British colonies.
Germany comes next to Great Britain as the largest consumer of eggs in Europe. Her imports are a little over a billion and a half a year, and she is obliged to pay £3,000,000 a year for the eggs she buys from other countries.
Japan is now using a great many eggs, though few are produced in the country. As they are very much cheaper in China, the eggs Japan uses are almost all imported from that country.
Russia is the largest exporter of eggs. The number sent from that country in 1896 was 1,475,000,000, of which 289,000,000 were shipped to the United Kingdom.
The manufacture of matches in Germany has become so important an industry that the factories are now using every year about 5,500,000 cubic feet of aspen wood, of which about three-fifths is imported from Russia.
Bavaria alone has twenty-six lead-pencil factories, which employ from 9,000 to 10,000 workmen, and produce on an average 4,320,000 lead pencils and crayons every week. It is a curious fact that the use of German lead pencils in all the public offices and schools of France is forbidden by law.[{54}]