DEPRESSION 26^ 



still, though some of the war taxes had been remitted, heavily 

 taxed ; for the taxes on malt, soap, salt, candles, leather, all 

 pressed heavily.^ The chief cause of the distress was the 

 long-felt reaction after the war, but it was aggravated by the 

 return to cash payments in 1819. Gold had fallen to its real 

 value, and the fall in gold had been followed by a fall in the 

 prices of every other article.^ The produce of many thousand 

 acres in England did not sell that year for as much money 

 as was expended in growing it, without reckoning rent, taxes, 

 and interest on capital.^ Estates worth ;^3,ooo a year, says 

 the same writer, some years since, were now worth ;^i,ooo. 

 Bacon had gone down from 6s. 6d. to "is. ^d. a stone ; South- 

 down ewes from 50^. to i^s., and lambs from 42^'. to $s. 



A Dorset farmer told the Parliamentary committee that 

 since 1815 he knew of fifty farmers, farming 34,000 acres, 

 who had failed entirely."* 



In the Tyne Mercury of October 30, 1821, it was recorded 

 that Mr. Thos. Cooper of Bow purchased 3 milch cows and 

 40 sheep for ;^i8 16^. 6d.y which sum four years previously 

 would only have bought their skins. Prime beef was sold in 

 Salisbury market at 4^. retail, and good joints of mutton at 

 '>i\d? Everywhere the farmers were complaining bitterly, but 

 ' hanging on like sailors to the masts or hull of a wreck '. In 

 Sussex labourers were being employed to dig holes and fill 

 them in again, proof enough of distress but also of great 

 folly. Many thousands of acres were now a mass of thistles 

 and weeds, once fair grass land ploughed up during 

 the war for wheat, and abandoned at the fall of prices. 



' Inqtiiry into Agricultural Distress (1822), p. 40, 



^ Walpole, op. cit. ii. 22. 



' A Letter to the Earl of Liverpool by an Old Tory, 1822. The Com- 

 mittee on Agricultural Distress found that farmers were paying rent out 

 of capital {Parliamentary Reports, Committees, v. 71), and that leases 

 fixed on the basis of the high prices of the war meant ruin to the farmer 

 if held to his engagement. 



* Parliamentary Reports^ Committees, ix. 138. 



' Cobbett, Rural Rides (ed. 1885), i. 3, 16. 

 + 



