Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/33

 and, as is generally the case, the wages of the labourer are the first item in a farmer's expenses that the latter begins to curtail. Were the price of corn steady and the habits of the labourer improving, he would not submit to the reduction, and each improvement in agriculture which, under a free trade, would have the effect of lowering prices, would be participated in by the labourer, instead of being as at present entirely absorbed by the landlord and farmer. The labourer would then say—"Why should I continue to work and apply my labour to the land, without an increased share of the increased products, and why should the landlord and farmer, and tithe-owner, usurp all the increased production, and leave me in the same situation that I was in fifty years ago. Improvements in manufactures have made almost all kinds of clothing a third cheaper; we are better clad than our forefathers, why should we not be better fed also?" This would be a very fair argument for a labourer, and serves well to illustrate the effects of monopoly in corn, and free trade in clothing. How often do we hear people say that the working classes are dressing too fine, and above their situation? Why it only shows that articles of dress have become cheaper, and as a natural consequence the poor are better clad than they used to be. There has been no monopoly in manufacturing, and the consequence has been that the public have reaped the benefit. But with food the case is different. Of this there has been a monopoly, and the consequence has been that the people are not better fed than they used to be.

Though the money wages of agricultural labour have in many instances fallen with the price of corn during the last thirty years in England, yet they invariably form in cheap years a larger portion of the expenditure of a farmer than they do in dear years. In the out-goings of one farm with which I am acquainted, I find that the labour in a dear year formed 19 per cent. of the whole out-goings; and in years of comparative cheapness it formed 25 per cent. of the whole out-goings. Thus the labourer in the one case takes 25 per cent. of the produce for his share, and in the other case only 19. Though the proportion may not be the same upon all farms, still, I believe, the principle to be the same; and I have heard farmers say, that in some years of extraordinary cheapness it has taken nearly all their wheat crop to pay the labour. This has sometimes been made an objection among farmers to a repeal of the corn laws; that they