122 CAUSES OF THE DECLINE 



w 



and an attempt was made to check the fall by prohibiting 

 importation when the price was less than 80*. The attempt 

 failed. The commercial crisis, which had accompanied the 

 later years of the war and which followed it, aggravated 

 the distress. Europe, exhausted by the long war, could not 

 buy our manufactures, and the -poverty at home reduced 

 the demand there. War prices were gone, war taxes 

 remained. The credit of Pitt's paper currency declined, 

 and the return to cash payments produced the same result 

 as a drain on gold. Thus, prices continued to fall, and 

 were subject to violent fluctuations, partly owing to bad 

 seasons. In 1821, the price of wheat went down as low as 

 36*. 1 In 1849, the Corn Laws were repealed. In 1851, the 

 average price was 38s. 7d. } the lowest point reached till 

 1884, when it fell to 35*. 8r/. 2 



By this time foreign competition had begun to tell. 

 The opening up of new lands and communications, the 

 phenomenal cheapening of methods of cultivation and of 

 transit falsified the prophecies of Ricardo and of Malthus. 

 Rents fell rapidly. The increased introduction of machinery 

 finally ruined the home industries. 



Before these successive blows all those, whether yeomen 

 or squires, who had speculated with borrowed money in 

 land, or raised mortgages on their property to improve it 

 or for other reasons, or who in the good times had learnt 

 expensive habits, could no longer hold out, and had to sell. It 

 was with difficulty, then, that any landholder could survive 

 who had not either a very large rental or some other form 

 of income whereby to keep his estate together. 3 Here was 



1 In 1819, the price of wheat varied from 58s. to 84s. ; 1820, from 

 54s. to 81s. ; 1821, from 36s. to 66s. ; beef and mutton suffered a like 

 fate ; Prothero, Pioneers, p. 98. 



2 Prothero, p. 256. 



3 In some counties, e.g. Devon, yeomen who had done well in the 





