Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/53

 to feed the poor. In the agricultural districts they are the chief rate-payers. Now, the corn-laws augment the poor-rates by a double operation. They increase the number of paupers, by depressing trade and manufactures;—and they add to the cost of their maintenance, by raising the price of corn. The latter effect may be judged of from the annexed table, from which it appears, that, in five agricultural counties alone, the difference of pauper expenditure between a cheap year, and a dear one, was £78,131 under the old system, and £71,913 under the amended law. The former effect, though equally certain, it is not so easy to show by tabular statements; but it is notorious that the manufacturing districts, when prosperous, draft off, and provide employment for many thousands of labourers from the agricultural counties, who would otherwise have to be supported by the rates of their native parishes; —that, if these labourers had