204 OfConi-Latcs. Bk. iii. 



would have been still considerably lower. This 

 low price of corn, even if by means of lowered 

 rents our present state of cultivation could be in 

 a great degree preserved, must give such a check 

 to future improvement, that if the ports were to 

 continue open, we should certainly not grow a 

 sufficiency at home to keep pace with our in- 

 creasing population ; and at the end of ten or 

 twelve years we might be found by a new war in 

 the same state that we were at the commencement 

 of the present. We should then have the same 

 career of high prices to pass through, the same 

 excessive stimulus to agriculture* followed by the 

 same sudden and depressing check to it, and the 

 same enormous loans borrowed with the price of 

 wheat at 90 or 100 shillings a quarter, and the 

 monied incomes of the landholders and industri- 

 ous classes of society nearly in proportion, to be 

 paid when wheat is at 50 or 60 shillings a quarter, 

 and the incomes of the landlords and industrious 

 classes of society greatly reduced — a state of 

 things which cannot take place without an exces- 

 sive aggravation of the difficulty of paying taxes, 

 and particularly that invariable monied amount 

 which pays the interest of the national debt. 



On the other hand a country which so restricts 

 the importations of foreign corn as on an average 



* According to the evidence before the House of Lords (Re- 

 ports, p. 49), the freight and insurance alone on a quarter of corn 

 were greater by 48 shillings in 1811 than in 1814. Without any 

 artificial interference then, it appears that war alone may occasion 

 unavoidably a prodigious increase of price. 



