Page:An Essay of the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain (1804).djvu/34

Rh posed every four or five years; and by this progress we might increase the price of wheat as rapidly as we do the national debt. The absurdity of such a measure as this is sufficiently exposed by the very mention of it.

But the advocates for the bounty on exportation may say. that the case is not the same with this, as with the bounty on production. The foreign market they may represent as so extensive that all the competition which would be produced by greatest increase of British corn, could have very little effect in reducing the price, and by consequence in reducing the profits of the British farmer.

Are we then to suppose it to be the opinion of those persons, that they can raise the profits of the farmer permanently above the profits of the other species of business in the country? They may as well undertake to procure for him sunshine and rain whenever each would be agreeable. Every removal of stock from the other kinds of business in the country to that-of farming lessens the competition of capital in all those kinds of business, and thus raises the rate of profit. If the profit of the farmer does not fall by this increase of capital, more capital leaves the other trades of the country, and the profit in them rises, till at last they are brought upon an equality with the business of the-farmer. The only effectual method/ therefore, the only method by which in the nature of things, the profits of the farmer can be raised