The State Protection of Agriculture. 199 



Forestalling Act, and buying up grain for exportation outside 

 the markets overt ; and in the second the foreign trade in 

 corn now began to receive an enormous impetus by the new 

 State policy of a bribe of 5.§. per quarter to the exporters. In 

 other words, English farmers began to be paid for growing 

 wheat and sending it abroad, instead of having to pay the 

 State for tliis privilege, as did their French brethren.^ It was 

 this agency, coming into force, not, as is generally supposed, 

 just after the Revolution, but in the latter part of the reign of 

 Charles II.,- which caused a flow of corn outwards, while its 

 high prices and scarcity at home created a back current of 

 imported corn, stemmed, however, by immediate and strenuous 

 legislative restrictions. 



By the help of history we obtain a clue to this unlooked-for 

 generosity to the Landed Interest at the hands of Govern- 

 ment. All the available resources of real property had been 

 utilised in furthering the royal cause during the late wars. 

 Loyal and willing though his country gentlemen still were, 

 there was a limit to their generosity. This was reached at 

 the period of the second Dutch war, for the furtherance of 

 which the landlords at last began to grudge the king his sup- 

 plies. Finall}'- Charles, at his wits' end, and with the sound 

 of foreign artillery still ringing in his ears, devised a fresh 

 Subsidy Act, which, though, like its predecessors, it abstracted 

 the necessaries of war principally from the land, dangled 

 before the eyes of the discontented husbandmen the prospect 

 of immediate gain in the shape of a 5s. bounty on each quarter 

 of exported wheat. Thus 25 Car. II, c. 1 introduced that 

 principle which was renewed in (not initiated by) the Act of 

 1698.^ But the short interval between the two statutes marks 

 a crisis in financial policy. Before the Act of 1698 the supply 

 either of fighting material for the king's army, or of the neces- 

 sary funds to defray the costs of his extravagances, had a good 



' hes Interets de la France mal entendua. Comte de Boulaiuvilliers. 



^ 25 Car. II. c. 1, § 38. It was in force three years, during which wheat 

 and malt were dearer than at &nj former times, save those of public con- 

 fusion ; and prices dropped at once when, in lOTG, the bounty ceased. 



' Compare 25 Car. II. c. 1, § 38, and 1 W. & M. c. 12. 



