Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/35

 appears to have gradually fallen in the last forty years. The price of a barrel of flour of 196lbs. appears to have been for the following periods:—

which would be in our money, per stone of fourteen pounds, for the different periods respectively, about 2s. 9d., 2s. 5d., 2s. 2d., and 1s. 7d.

With other articles of agricultural produce, proportionably cheap, people here who say that wages rise and fall with the price of provisions might imagine that wages were in America about 9s. a week, and that people would be very well satisfied and contented upon that sum. But so far from this being the case, the usual price of a day's labour is now a dollar (4s. 2d.), and this high price appears to have had no connection with the price of flour during the whole of these periods, but to have been constantly increasing while the price of flour has been constantly diminishing. As the result of a certain quantity of labour at given periods, Mr. Carey, of Philadelphia, gives the following. In 1699, as appears from the books of William Penn, according to the price of flour, and the price of a day's work at that time, it would have taken a man,—

For an agricultural labourer in England, at the present day, with wages at 9s. a week, which would be about the average, and flour at 2s. a stone, it would require 213 days' labour to obtain a ton of flour.

There is also an absolute necessity for wages being high to enable people to purchase and consume large quantities of food, for if the increased food were not consumed by the working classes, it could not be consumed at all. Had the markets of England been open to the corn of America, there is no doubt but that the price of corn would have been lower in England, and more would have been consumed by the working classes. The proportion consumed by the working classes would have been larger, and the share of the capitalist