Ch. xi. Bounties upon E^vportatiou. 167 



against large and warlike states, must greatly 

 aggravate the difficulties of procuring a steady 

 supply ; and if it be true that unfavourable sea- 

 sons are not unfrequently general, it is impossible 

 to conceive that they should not occasionally be 

 subject to great variations of price. 



It has been sometimes stated that scarcities are 

 partial, not general, and that a deficiency in one 

 country is always compensated by a plentiful 

 supply in others. But this seems to be quite an 

 unfounded supposition. In the evidence brought 

 before the Committee of the House of Commons 

 in 1814, relating to the corn-laws, one of the corn 

 merchants being asked whether it frequently hap- 

 pened that crops in the country bordering upon 

 the Baltic failed, when they failed here, replied, 

 " When crops are unfavourable in one part of 

 " Europe, it generally happens that they are more 

 " or less so in another."* If any person will take 

 the trouble to examine the contemporaneous prices 

 of corn in the different countries of Europe for 

 some length of time, he will be convinced that the 

 answer here given is perfectly just. In the last 

 hundred and fifty years, above twenty will be 

 found in which the rise of prices is common to 

 France and England, although there was seldom 

 much intercourse between them in the trade of 

 corn : and Spain and the Baltic nations, as far as 

 their prices have been collected, appear frequently 

 to have shared in the same general deficiency. 



* Report, p. 93. 



