116 AGRICULTURAL DEPRESSION, 1873 TO 1887 



cry was heard that the taxes and the prices ruined farmers^ 

 and it was maintained in 1816 that wheat could not be 

 grown at a profit under 54.s., and that, if the tenantry had 

 their lands rent free, they could not subsist under present 

 conditions. Then, as now, political agitators were prepared 

 to use depression to foment discontent. In 1766 a writer 

 says that the ' sober industrious poor ' are the real sufferers 

 from high prices ; but ' who,' he asks, ' ever heard of any 

 of this character mixing themselves with mobs,' made up 

 of the ' drunken, lazy, and abandoned,' whose case was 

 misrepresented, exaggerated, or rather ' created by certain 

 senseless and inj udicious writers in the common newspapers ? ' 

 In the last century, as well as this, every politician at a 

 coffee-house had his infallible nostrum ; theorists elaborated 

 impracticable schemes, which were supported by the ignorant 

 and used by the factious ; oppositions, themselves sitting 

 in the cold shade of poverty, bewailed the miseries of the 

 poor ; dowagers at quadrille tables inveighed against the 

 cruelty of Parliament in disregarding the voice of the 

 people ; quiet old gentlemen from the depths of their arm- 

 chairs recommended military executions of butchers, bakers, 

 poulterers, and fishmongers as the most effective remedy. 

 If we are to believe half what we see in print, times have 

 been as bad before. Let the reflection encourage us in 

 facing present difiiculties. 



For the last fourteen years the country has been passing 

 through a crisis of prolonged, if not unexampled, severity. 

 Three previous epochs stand out conspicuously as periods 

 of agricultural depression. In the last half of the sixteenth 

 century, at the close of the seventeenth century, and during 

 the years 1813-36, the disordered state of the currency 

 constituted an important factor in the distress. Similarly 

 the distress in 1765-73 was partly due to the excessive 



