Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/50

 peculiar severity upon the English agriculturist. It depresses prices just when his stock of corn is largest, and when he is most anxious to realise;—and raises them when he has none to sell. This is not an accidental operation: it is inherent in the nature of a sliding-scale. In five years out of six, prices are highest just before the harvest, because then the stock of wheat in the country is the lowest; and they fall immediately after the harvest, from the opposite reason. We give in a note a table illustrative of this fact from 1829 to 1841, showing that the average price has invariably fallen about harvest-time nearly eight per cent, or from 60s. 4d. to 55s. 9d. a quarter. In the present year, this result has been still more remarkably brought out. The harvest was unusually early, and the stocks of farmers more than usually exhausted. On July 9th the weekly average was 65s. 8d.; on September 10th, when the harvest was generally got in, and when farmers in the south were ready to bring their wheat to market, it had dropped to 51s. 6d.—a fall of nearly 22 per cent!

Now that this fall is to be attributed chiefly, though not altogether, to the operation of the sliding-scale, is evident from the fact that it is equally observable in defective as in abundant years. But for the sliding-scale, a rise in price would naturally be the immediate consequence of a deficient harvest. But the duty being always lowest when the price is highest, and prices having, as we have just seen, generally reached their maximum in August or September, the whole