Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/36

 less. It would have been a matter of difficulty for the wealthy classes to have kept down the price of labour, even had other circumstances been unfavourable to the labourer. The habits of a people are difficult to break through when once improved by increasing wealth and the enjoyment of new comforts, and it being the tendency of our nature rather to acquire fresh luxuries than to relinquish those already possessed, it is thus that the manners and customs of a people become every day more and more civilised.

The author of some corn tracts, writing in 1765, says—"Bread made of wheat is becoming more generally the food of the labouring people," and the cause of this happy change appears to have arisen from a comparatively low price of corn. There is, indeed, no other cause to which it can be reasonably ascribed. According to Arthur Young, the average price of wheat for 100 years previous to 1700, was 38s. 2d. a quarter, and the average wages of an agricultural labourer were 10¼d. a day. For the sixty-six years ending in 1766, the price of wheat was 32s. 1d. a quarter, and the average wages of a labourer were a shilling a day. In the first instance, a man could earn but little more than a bushel of wheat for a week's work, and in the second instance, a bushel and a half. The steady fall in the price of corn appears to have operated favourably for the labourer, and to have done that which a sudden fall could not have effected. Rapid changes in price being, as I have before observed, unfavourable to the labourer, inasmuch as, in dear years, he is deprived of comforts, and, in cheap years, neither his own wants, nor the situation of the farmer will allow of the full advantage.

It may be said that the demand for agricultural labour will be injured, in the event of a repeal of the corn laws, by land being thrown out of cultivation. No intelligent agriculturist, I think, can be found at the present day, who believes that such would be the case. So long as land will pay any rent at all, it is almost needless to observe it will never go out of cultivation. A vast quantity of the waste land, enclosed during the last sixty years, was enclosed when wheat was at 40s. a quarter, and there is no reason to suppose that the same land, which is now improved, will go out of cultivation with wheat, at the same price; and, in order to make the poor or badly cultivated land of England grow more corn, a larger expenditure of labour, rather than a smaller, would be required. The Scotch farmers, who gave evidence before a