REMEDIES SUGGESTED. 57 



all, could afford to live only on " duffery " or " flummery " — 

 that is, oatmeal and water boiled " — and mashed potatoes, 

 never seeing meat once in a year. It was, in ]\Ir. Prothero's 

 words, " one of the blackest periods of English history." 

 Farms were thrown up, notices to quit poured in, numbers 

 of tenants absconded — many large farmers lost everything 

 and became applicants for pauper allowance.^ Relief 

 never came till 1836, when more propitious conditions, 

 unaffected by the Corn Laws, ushered in a period of recovery. 

 "The truth is," says Mr. Prout, who knew something of 

 corn growing, having made a wheat-after- wheat shift to 

 pay, " that yield and expenditure have a greater influence 

 upon profit than the price of corn has." 



The distress which extravagant appreciation of corn 

 brought upon the industrial population, and thereby upon 

 industry and commerce, as a matter of course reacted power- 

 fully upon Agriculture in depriving it of its market. Sum- 

 ming up the general effect of the Corn Laws, in the latest 

 edition (1912) of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," Dr. 

 Ingram puts it this way : 



" The com statutes (from 1815 to 1836), though occupying 

 an enormous amount of time and attention in the Houses of 

 Parliament, may be briefly treated, for the}' are simply a record 

 of the impotence of legislation to maintain the price of a com- 

 modity at a high point, when all the natural economic causes in 

 operation are opposed to it." 



And so it was to the end of the chapter. Real relief, which 

 Mr. Prothero calls " the golden age of English Agriculture," 

 never came till 1853, when the Corn Laws had been finally 

 repealed and when Free Trade had had time and opportunity 

 to produce its inevitable results. The Nation had by that 

 time adopted Sir J. Caird's wise advice to take to " High 

 Farming as the best Substitute for Protection," and it 

 prospered upon it. And it had found that Sir James was 

 right also in his declaration that the previously dreaded 

 Free Trade was not " an enemy bent on mischief, but a 

 kind and judicious friend," stimulating to increased pro- 

 duction which carried profit with it. The Germans who, 



^ R. E. Prothero, " English Farming, Past and Present," p. 319. 



