1827.] Third Report of the Emigration Committee. 



the teeth of each other an argument may be made out which shall appear 

 unanswerable. 



As a proposition of itself, nothing can be more plausible or more simple, 

 than that If our population be too dense, we should reclaim the waste 

 lands, and find subsistence for it. At least, it may be said these lands will 

 produce food, for the number of hands employed to cultivate them ! Unfortu- 

 nately, to prove the truth of this is to prove nothing : for we cannot draw a 

 line in the law and regime which regulates our population ; and every aero 

 of land which is cultivated in this country must not only pay the labourer 

 that tills it ; it must go out of cultivation, or it must pay more. The man 

 who sows the field is riot, as society exists, the first who reaps the produce 

 of it: the church, the state, and the public creditor must all with a host 

 of minor claimants be satisfied before him. The land which now lies 

 waste must pay, if cultivated, some rent for it is the property of some- 

 body : some charge of improvement were it only the maintenance 4'the 

 labourer, from the time of his commencing work until he obtains his 

 crop, and the stamp of the parchment that gives him his lease or title of 

 possession. The seed that goes into the ground must be paid : the farmer 

 cannot lie in a ditch, or under a hedge the interest of capital upon build- 

 ing him a house to live in must be paid. Then the tithe must be paid ; the 

 poor-rates must be paid ; the king's tax, and the county-rate, and the rate 

 for building the church that a new village requires must be paid. And 

 very one of these charges must be satisfied to the last farthing out of the 

 produce of any land the moment we bring it into tillage before the cul- 

 tivator can taste a single grain of wheat, or even a potatoe that has grown 

 upon it. 



Thus much then for " the capability of the soil;" and as extremes are 

 said, especially in argument, to lie near one another, the next proposition 

 that we meet abroad from the man next door to the waste land: cultivator 

 - is that which insists upon finding food for our surplus population, by 

 freely admitting foreign corn. Our manufacturers are half fed, or starving, 

 with gluts of unsold cotton (and powers unlimited of producing more) upon 

 their hands. The people of Poland and Prussia are ill clad or naked, with 

 corn rotting, for want of consumption, in their lofts and warehouses. Can 

 any thing be more monstrous than a legislative enactment which denies 

 these parties the liberty of exchanging with each other? keeping the foreigner 

 without the manufactures which he is in want of, and our own industrious 

 manufacturer idle, and without food ? This proposition, which, moderated 

 and guarded, perhaps comes the nearest to possibility and policy, neverthe- 

 less proceeds directly to the arrangement of throwing old land out of cul- 

 tivation, instead of bringing new land into it ; and, moreover, it is a policy 

 which, adopted in its full extent, would produce a convulsion of property 

 that it is impossible to contemplate : it would beggar every landowner in 

 England. A fall of twenty per cent, in the price of corn to-morrow, would 

 reduce the rent or income of every proprietor in England by one-half. 

 If the whole reduction fell upon the land owner, his whole rent would be 

 absorbed ; but this would not be the case, because the general fall of prices 

 would assist him something, and the profit of the farmer would be pared 

 down to make up another portion of the deficiency. But still the reduc- 

 tion of his rent to one-half and it would be reduced full a half would 

 effect the landowner's certain ruin. It is an error to suppose that it loaves 

 him with half his original wealth . it leaves him a beggar : probably 

 poorer than a beggar : for here the private rights and vested interests of the 



M.iVI. New Series. VoL.\V. No. 21. 4 D 



