Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/28

 the farmer that the consumption of the country should be greater. If with a free trade, instead of the present annual importation of one or two millions of quarters, we had five or six millions, it would be impossible that the low prices of 1821 and 1822, or 1835 and 1836, could ever again occur, for it would be impossible, under such circumstances, that we could be an exporting country. Nor would it be a small remuneration to the farmer if, instead of 39s. 4d., the price of wheat in 1835, it were 46s. or 48s., which would be at least the difference between an importing and an exporting price. It is not the interest of the farmer, as our pro-corn law advocates tell us, to be independent of foreigners, and to grow enough for our own consumption, for it is not the interest of the farmer that prices should be the same here as abroad; and it must always be a protection to the farmer that the freights and expenses of sending corn to this country should be incurred by the foreigner, and that at no time we should cease to import corn. That corn would be at a high price under a free trade, I do not think possible, or even desirable, but that it must gradually increase in price, I think the situation and circumstances of this country render probable. Though there is still much waste land in the country capable of being cultivated, and much land already under cultivation capable of improvement, yet the importation required would be very great; and as soon as countries near to England had disposed of their surplus produce, we should have to go further for our supplies, and the more distant the ports from which we have to obtain them the higher must be the freights and expenses. The price of corn would thus be naturally enhanced to the producer in England, and being paid for, as it must be, in manufactured goods of some kind or other, would not be felt as a burden or an injury by the rest of the community. It is not altogether a low price, but the power and liberty to exchange with other countries that we want. The price would then be yielded by willing wealth that is now wrung from poverty, and our landlords and farmers would find to their surprise that there are high prices of two kinds; one caused by deficiency in one particular article, and the other by general abundance of all useful articles. By the first of these two methods of obtaining high prices, they have attempted to benefit their own class, by keeping corn out of the country, and the result has been disappointment to themselves, and misery and suffering to others, by the second mode—by letting corn come into the country, other classes will be benefitted, and will live in ease and abundance; and from this ease and abundance will flow those remunerating and steady