204. SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
engendered by war or by monetary causes—that what is still the greatest 
industry of these islands (in its capitalisation, the numbers of its em- 
ployees, and the value of its output) receives any appreciable measure of 
recognition, for, if we exclude what is familiarly designated ‘ Education 
and Research —a euphemism for the semi-official dissemination of 
scientific knowledge amongst practising agriculturists—international 
peace and domestic prosperity have ever tended to be accompanied by 
apathy and neglect of rural interests. 
It is a trite, and familiar, saying that ‘ History repeats itself,’ but, in 
the years that followed the Napoleonic war, the legislative attempts of 
our forebears to counter falling prices (including a National debt multi- 
plied, as is ours now, tenfold), unemployment, social unrest, and many 
other evils only too familiar to us were, mutatis mutandis, and up to a 
point in time, remarkably similar to those which we ourselves put forward 
a hundred years later. It was, indeed, to the historian, a cause of surprise 
that, in the years 1918-1922, the administrators concerned did not appear 
to be acquainted with the sequence of events three generations earlier ; 
much unnecessary friction and heartburning, many a miscalculation, 
involving either ultimate repeal of legislation or excessive expenditure of 
public funds might, it seemed then, with a little knowledge of economic 
history, have been avoided. ‘Thus, the Agriculture Act of 1920, conceived 
in the mistaken view that a world shortage of wheat was imminent, and 
guaranteeing, therefore, to home producers abnormally high prices for a 
considerable number ae years—which, it was feared, might also be pro- 
ductive of further wars—had its counterpart in the equally abortive Corn 
Law of 1815, the aim of which was also to remunerate under peace condi- 
tions British farmers and land-owners upon a war-time scale of values. 
Upon both occasions the officially unforeseen, or ignored, superabundance 
of supplies—derived in the one case from home-produced sources, in the 
other from the ends of the earth—frustrated man’s efforts to perpetuate 
artificial prices. Listen to an: impatient leader-writer of The Times in 
January 1826, who wrote: ‘ What the nation pants for, is a sensible fall 
of prices. Bread must be had cheap. Rents must be sacrificed to the 
lives of the people. It is monstrous impudence to talk about the ruin of 
the farmers from a lowering in the price of produce. The farmers want 
nothing better than low prices, if they can but get their lands at pro- 
portionate rents. . . . The paper currency has been pushed to madness, 
as a temporary help to the manufacturing interest against the monopoly 
of corn. Leave the loaf of bread to find its own value. It is horrible to 
tell a starving family, “‘ You shall have no food but at a price beyond your 
means of procuring it.”’ In our own post-war experience the loaf 
found ‘ its own value’ more quickly, and the Press could soon point out 
that it cost but a fraction of the corresponding price on the Continent, 
thereby suggesting in effect that it might be too cheap. Incidentally, the 
policy of the now unfortunately defunct Empire Marketing Board and 
of Ottawa’s resolutions were, in the 1815 Act, also forestalled, for thereby 
the effective order of preference was the familiar one of (1) home produced, 
(2) Canadian, and (3) foreign (vzz. European) wheat. 
Again, up to 1836 (with the exception of London, where the custom 
