Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/10

 our own population, the legislature had it in their power to fix the minimum price at which grain should be sold. We all know the bitter disappointment of those who entered into contracts and leases with that idea. A few years' experience made a solvent tenant almost a rarity. Notwithstanding these attempts to produce a continued artificial famine, a large importation of foreign grain taking place immediately previous to, and joined to the good crop of 1822, reduced prices one half, or wheat to 40s. per quarter. Then, again, we had Parliamentary Committees, but they could not report where the evil lay, because it did not happen to occur to them that rent had anything to do with the distress of the farmer. But I need not remind of this period those "poor farmers" who were obliged to sell their crop to pay a rent which they had agreed to give by calculating the price of grain at double what they could then obtain. Much persuasion surely cannot be required to satisfy them of both the danger and the folly of attempting to obtain famine prices in ordinary seasons. Neither shall I attempt to convince the wealthy, who could afford to store up their own crop, or buy that of their poorer neighbours, because I acknowledge at once that, for them, this system "of a hunger and a burst" wrought admirably, whatever wretchedness it produced to other members of society. The law of 1828 was a new plan to prevent importation by means of a sliding scale of duties; but as it has been confessed by all parties to have proved only beneficial to gambling speculators, it has been tinkered anew, and, as the bill of Sir Robert Peel, it has been again placed on the statute book during the last session of parliament. It is clear, however, that this supposed amendment was not meant to go to the root of the evil, (and indeed this was not even pretended by Sir Robert Peel,) but was intended to keep the price of wheat at 56s. per quarter, which has now been discovered to be a fair price, though we have seen that little more than twenty years ago farmers asserted that 80s., and some even 90s. per quarter was the lowest sum that wheat in this country could be raised for.

I have noticed only a few of the parliamentary enactments regarding grain, for there have been at least fifty during the last 200 years; but they all proceed upon the same short-sighted policy of endeavouring to extract the last penny from the buyers. Yet, notwithstanding all these laws, and the most complete monopoly of the home market that laws could give, how often have we heard of agricultural distress? distress which I know to have been no phantom of the imagination! Parliament has been besieged with petitions which should have been presented to the landlords. Committees have sat inquiring into the causes of the distress, but which only diverted the