The State Protection of Agriculture. 201 



as applying in the case of the tithe would also apply in the 

 case of taxation. The English agriculturist, loaded with the 

 burdens of our fiscal system, would enter upon his competition 

 with the foreign producer on unequal terms, being, as it were 

 (without special State protection), handicapped in his attempts 

 to undersell the foreign producer in the home markets. But 

 Petty did not recognise this circumstance, or he would have 

 preferred that alternative scheme of his wkich set apart one 

 twenty-fifth part of the land itself to provide for the State 

 expenses, thereby leaving the rest of the soil to be cultivated 

 entirely free of any burdens of this nature. 



There was yet another circumstance which must have begun 

 to exert its influence on our State policy even before this par- 

 ticular epoch, and that was the emigration question. During 

 the earlier Stuartine period some of our Puritan population had 

 migrated to America, and begun to do there what they should 

 have been doing here ; namely, increasing the wealth of their 

 country by rendering its virgin soil profitable. The folly of 

 neglecting the interests of our native husbandry, and thereby 

 as it were giving a fillip to emigration, must have become 

 apparent to politicians by the end of the seventeenth century, 

 when the huge proportions of waste lands were demanding 

 the services of every unit of the population. And we know 

 from Young's Annals ^ how, in 1784, John, Lord Sheffield, 

 pointed out with regret that the agricultural produce of the 

 descendants of those earlier Stuartine voyagers (by then num- 

 bering close on two million souls) was already competing in 

 English markets with our own ; and that had we retained 

 them here, apportioned amongst them our wastes on condi- 

 tion of cultivation, and encouraged their efforts by means of 

 bounties, our own unproductive acres would have been ren- 

 dered remunerative instead of those in the American colonies. 



But even when prompted by the best of motives, our legis- 

 lators unfortunately often adopted measures which had a con- 

 trary effect to that which they desired. They recognised that 

 when they prohibited exportation they lowered prices, and when 



* Annals of Agriculture, vol. i. p. 380. A. Young, 1784. 



