Price of Wheat , over 40 Harvest-Years, 1852-3 to 1891-2. 129 
Articles ” — clocks, cotton manufactures, glass, hats and bonnets 
of straw, iron girders, beams, pillars, and other articles, leather, 
boots, shoes, and gloves, paper, silk, straw-plait, watches, woollen 
manufactures, silk manufactures, and others not enumerated, 
were in the same year (1891) imported to the value of more than 
65,000,000/. ! No doubt the home producers of these various 
articles would be able satisfactorily to explain why the large 
amounts of them imported are not produced at home instead, 
when such numbers of our population are unemployed ; and 
doubtless the various reasons could be summed up in the few 
words — it would not pay ! Agriculturists, we suppose, would not 
presume to pass a judgment on the validity of the reasons given 
by the experts in the different branches of manufacture. But 
agriculturists are treated in a very different manner by those 
who apparently know as little about the necessary conditions of 
profitable agriculture, as agriculturists may be supposed to do of 
the various manufactures of which we import 05,000,000/. worth 
a year ! 
The truth is that, for the essential purpose of providing 
cheap food for the people, and for the urban manufacturing 
populations especially, free trade in agricultural produce has 
been established, and imports have, accordingly, immensely 
increased. An inevitable result of this has been a great re- 
duction in price, the cost for bread-stuffs alone having been, as 
we have shown in this paper, less than two-thirds as much per 
head of the population during the later as during the earlier years 
of the period of our inquiry. A necessary consequence has been 
to reduce the area under grain crops, and with this the area under 
the plough, in our own country, and hence to reduce the amount 
of labour required to a given area, and so naturally to reduce the 
rural population. A further consequence has been great reduction 
in rents, and serious loss of tenants’ capital. But the urban and 
manufacturing populations resent the idea that they should bear 
any share of the burden resulting from the competition with 
foreign producers, and the great reduction in price chiefly in 
their interest, necessitating as it does a less requirement 
for rural labour, which, together with a rapidly increasing 
population, leads many to go into the towns. It so happens, too, 
that the most practicable suggestions for change in our agri- 
cultural system would only tend to increase the particular evil 
complained of, by still further reducing our arable and increasing 
our grass land area ; whilst some of the schemes proposed are 
of very limited applicability, and others would pretty certainly 
be unprofitable, if not indeed attended with considerable loss. 
We have indicated above in which direction there seems the 
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