528 History of the English Landed Interest. 



failure at the present date also exceeds anytldng of the sort 

 experienced abroad. 



Modern invention and free trade have combined to place at 

 our doors the produce of the entire world. The excessive 

 freightage rates charged by our home railway companies 

 bestow indirectly a bounty on imported agricultural produce, 

 and impede free trade in the home markets almost as effectu- 

 ally as the mediaeval law against forestalling and regrating 

 did. The electric telegraph and steam navigation, by lifting 

 the home market beyond the disturbing influences of the home 

 supplies, have accentuated the drawbacks of our fickle climate. 

 The old days, when every soul in the kingdom, and a good 

 many foreign consumers besides, found their means of subsist- 

 ence out of the fruits of English husbandry, have given place 

 to a period when the whole of this country's agricultural 

 produce would scarcely suffice to supply the food requirements 

 of one- fourth of the present population. 



The native husbandman is not now, as formerly, compensated 

 for the diminished produce of a bad season by the increased 

 prices of a starved market. When therefore we behold the 

 inferiority of our native productions, as they lie in the markets 

 side by side with those grown under sunnier skies, we are in- 

 clined to attribute half the blame for our apparent failure to 

 the drawbacks of our English climate. Heavily weighted as 

 the home producer undoubtedly is by this natural defect, he is 

 still further handicapped by the taxation, levied and sustain- 

 able in the days of the Corn Laws, but utterly unbearable 

 as soon as foreign competition was freely permitted. Indeed, 

 the original basis of our fiscal system presupposed the entire 

 monopoly of the home markets by the native producer. The 

 English physiocrats had argued that as out of this soil of ours 

 proceeds all om' national wealth, out of it, therefore, must also 

 eventually be derived all our national revenues. As a kindness 

 to the producer himself, therefore, the more direct was the 

 taxation, the less was his expenditure over its collection. 

 Flimsy though this theoretical fabrication ever has been, it 

 cannot exist at all in a country whose markets are literally 

 glutted with foreign produce. 



