Page:An Essay of the Impolicy of a Bounty on the Exportation of Grain (1804).djvu/4

Rh our neighbours for the necessaries of life; and that of being liable to the hardships of scarcity. It was the policy of the State to contrive means for removing both of those disadvantages. They were acknowledged to be disadvantages of the greatest magnitude.

It was properly, and naturally, the chief object of concern, during the pressure of that scarcity, to find the means of redressing the evils immediately felt. The first of these was the importation of the article wanted. But various other measures were talked of. One became so much applauded that Mr. Burke, a very short time before his death, thought it necessary, in a memorial presented to Mr. Pitt, to prove the utter impolicy of it, under immediate fear that it was about to be adopted by the legislature. This was to fix by authority the rate of labourers’ wages, according to the price of corn; it being understood that at the rate of wages, and the price of corn then existing, the labourer was unable to procure the means of subsistence, and that the farmer was making extraordinary and unreasonable gains.

Besides the means of removing the evils immediately felt, the means were sought of preventing the recurrence of scarcity. For this object also one contrivance, that of public granaries, became so much a favourite, that Mr. Burke thought it necessary to warn the public against it in that performance to which I have already alluded, and