Corn Law of 1815, with what it probably would have been, had the trade been avowedly free; or if you had been contented with the protection afforded by the law of 1804, under which it would have been practically free. Prices would, indeed, have lowered, but no such extravagant hopes would have been excited, no such erroneous calculations would have been made; rents would have fallen to a level corresponding with the price of grain, the agricultural capital of the country would have been unimpaired, and the land would have remained in a better state of cultivation. Your nominal rentals might have been diminished, but your rents would have been collected with facility, and you would not have been driven, time after time, to the wretched expedient of returning a per centage to your tenants at each successive audit, in order to induce them to remain on their farms,an expedient, which proclaims to your fellow citizens, that those who resort to it are in the habit of demanding from their tenants a larger rent than they are capable of paying. Nothing, I must confess, is more distressing to me than to witness these half-yearly annunciations of this mis-called liberality of certain portions of the landed interest. Has it never struck you, fellow citizens, that this proceeding is no evidence of liberality, but rather of extortion; that the return of part of the rent may be proper, when called for by temporary calamity, by the effects of flood, or storm, or by some accidental misfortune overwhelming a particular tenant, or class of tenants; but that, when resorted to habitually, it is not to be justified; that it convicts those who have recourse to it of continued attempts to extract from their tenantry a rent not warranted by the value of agricultural produce; and that, so far from proving the liberality of the landlord, it affords testimony of a very different quality.'-pp. 21–25.

To the land-owner, corn-laws which keep up the price of corn, may, it is admitted, yield an advantage, but an unjust one, at the expense of the other classes; and not so great an advantage as may appear, since the extra price goes to augment very considerably, not merely the land-owner's rent, but his expenditure. He partakes, therefore, in some degree of the injury which he inflicts. But, injurious as such enactments are to the three branches of society connected with the land, the mischievous influences which they exercise upon the manufacturing and commercial interests of the country, are, his Lordship remarks, infinitely more varied and extensive. The following facts, adduced to shew their effect upon the cost of producing manufactured goods, are worthy of deep attention.

It is very much the fashion of the present day to dwell upon the important functions which machinery performs in the manufactories of this country; and hence an inference is drawn by some persons, that the price of manual labour is of trifling cousequence to our successful competition with the foreigner. These reasoners must imagine, that the dense population which has grown up in the manufacturing districts, has, comparatively, little to do with the manufacture, and that the great sums which that population receives in the shape of wages,

form no component part of the price of the manufactured article. They cannot be aware of the vast momentum of manual labour that is required, even for those branches of manufacture in which the efficiency of machinery is the most remarkable; still less can they be aware, that, in some very important branches, machinery is scarcely at all employed. In the processes of spinning and weaving, mechanical power has indeed been applied to a great extent; but the idea, that human labour has been superseded by machinery, is one of the most chimerical fancies that ever entered into the mind of man. The result of this application of artificial power has rather been to augment the quantity, and reduce the price of manufactured goods, than to dispense with the agency of man in their preparation; hence the comforts and enjoyments of all ranks have been promoted, and the agricultural labourer himself has been enabled to obtain articles, which nothing but the арplication of mechanical power could have brought within his reach. In other and very important manufactures, however, the use of machinery is extremely limited; and, upon these, the effect of an enhanced price of the first necessary of life is the most apparent, though, perhaps, it is not, in reality, more injurious to them, than to those branches of industry which seem to be withdrawn from its influence by the more extensive employment of machinery, but in which a large part of the expenditure may be ultimately resolved into the wages of labour.

In order to place this view of the necessary effects of the Corn Laws more distinctly before you, may I be allowed to exhibit some details of the expenses of labour in a few of our leading manufactures?

It is a subject to which your habits rarely attract your thoughts; few of you have local opportunities for considering it; and I am afraid that I have remarked in some a reluctance to enquire into the state of your manufacturing and commercial countrymen.

In the manufacture of fine woollen cloth, the wages paid by the manufacturer amount to about sixty per cent. upon the total expenditure incurred between the purchase of the wool in the foreign port, and the period when the cloth is in a state fit for sale; in the manufacture of linen yarn, the corresponding expenditure in wages is about 48 per cent.

In the manufacture of earthenware, the wages paid by the manufacturer amount to about 40 per cent.; that is to say, in the conversion of the requisite quantity of clay into goods worth 1007., 401. are paid to the workmen in the shape of wages.

It is obvious, however, that, in these three instances, especially in the latter, a very large proportion of the remaining charges is resolvable into the wages of labour, though, perhaps, not to so great an extent as in the next instances I am about to cite. In the manufacture of pig iron, the expense of labour upon the various ingredients employed, amounts to no less than 81 per cent.; and, in its subsequent conversion into bar iron, to 84 per cent.

In the working of collieries, the expenses are almost entirely resolvable into labour; and, in cases within my own knowledge, the wages actually paid exceed 90 per cent. upon the current expend

VOL. VIII.-N.S.

3 c

iture. In the different branches of the steel manufacture, the following may be stated as the proportions per cent. which materials and wages bear to each other.

Great as is the proportion which wages bear to the direct cost of manufacturing these articles, it must never be forgotten, that by far the greater part of the price of the material itself consists of wages; and consequently, that almost the entire value of our steel goods may be said to consist of the wages of labour.

6

These are only a few specimens, selected not for their peculiar applicability to my argument, but because I can speak of them, either from my own knowledge, or from information derived immediately from those who are engaged in these branches of industry.

With these examples before our eyes, surely it is impossible to imagine that the employment of machinery renders it a matter of indifference to our manufacturing capitalists, whether the food of the operative classes is dear or cheap. Even where machinery has been carried to the greatest extent, the wages of labour constitute a most important element in the price of manufactured goods; and high wages, when they are the result of dear provisions, not of a growing demand for labour, must ultimately tell upon commercial prosperity. Dear provisions must, indeed, produce one of the following effectsthey must either lower the condition of the labourer, or raise the rate of wages. Nobody can wish the former result; you must, therefore, wish high wages to be the result of dear corn-but if wages are high, the price of goods must be high-but if the price of goods be high, our manufacturers cannot compete with foreigners-but if they cannot compete with foreigners, our export trade is diminished-if our export trade is diminished, the prosperity of our manufacturing population is undermined--if their prosperity is undermined, they will consume fewer provisions; the demand for agricultural produce in the manufacturing counties will be restricted-the surplus produce will remain in the hands of the farmer, and the ultimate result will be a fall of rents, occasioned, be it remembered, by an attempt to raise them. Let this sink deep into your minds.'-pp. 28–34.

Lord Milton then proceeds to point out the importance of the demand for corn in the manufacturing districts, to the corn-grower himself, and the interest which the landed proprietors have in 'the activity of every workshop and counting-house in BirmingIham and Liverpool'. And he concludes with almost supplicating the order to which he belongs, to consider whether their own welfare is promoted by a policy at variance with the prosperity of the industrious classes.

One important conclusion to which we are led by the facts adduced in the present pamphlet is, that the increase of population has little to do with the real rate of wages, and still less with their nominal amount; that, upon this point, the Malthusian doctrines are, as upon most others, at irreconcileable variance with stubborn fact. Another circumstance deserving of attention is, that, although agricultural wages will eventually be governed by the price of corn, the rise or fall of money wages does not immediately adjust itself to the rise or fall of prices, but, as it will be seen from the tables given by Lord Milton, so slowly as to occasion in the mean time much suffering to the labourer or much loss to his employer; and that nothing, therefore, is so much to be deprecated as any great fluctuation in the price of wheat, against the consequences of which the labourer cannot by any possibility provide.

Lord Milton's views of the bancful operation of the Corn laws, are very ably supported by Mr. Mundell, in a pamphlet, the title of which we have given below *, and which we strongly recommend to the notice of our readers. It embraces topics connected with the currency, into which we cannot enter, but to which we intend to devote a future article, when a more recent pamphlet by the same Writer will claim our attention. The following paragraphs will shew how completely Mr. Mundell coincides with Lord Milton as to the connexion between the prosperity of the agriculturist and the steadiness of the home demand created by our manufacturing population.

Of all branches of industry, agriculture is the slowest in making returns. If enabled, however, to receive its natural encouragement, by the impulse of the great demand of our manufacturing population for food, its returns though slow are certain. But the whole operation of this law is in counteraction of the natural course of things, and its most mischievous operation upon the growth of grain is in adding hazard and uncertainty to slowness of return.'

The demand of our manufacturing population for food is the natural and the sure encouragement of our own agriculture. If we had had no corn laws, it may be difficult to say what would have been the price of corn in this country, but it is certain that it would have increased steadily and regularly with the increase of the population. We require, and should have had from other countries at all times, a supply of grain of a quality different from that which our climate enables us to raise. But the bulk of our supply would still have been the produce of our own soil; for the expense of bringing it from a distance would at all times be greater than the cheaper cost at which corn could be raised abroad.

The Necessary Operation of the Corn Laws, in driving Capital from the Cultivation of the Soil, &c. By Alexander Mundell, Esq.' 8vo. 1s. 6d. Longman. 1831.

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Little faith is to be placed in political arithmetic; and the price at which corn can be raised in any country never can be satisfactorily ascertained.

But this much is certain; that it is the great and increasing demand of our population for food, and not the cost of producing it, that is the cause of the high price of corn in this country above the price in countries whence we can derive a supply, when our demand is prevented from reaching such countries; and it is not less certain that if the intercourse were free, the price there would always be the same with the price here, excepting the expense and risk of transport. Every farmer knows that high prices never compensate for diminished production. But if the effect of our corn laws enacted in and since the year 1815 be permanently and progressively to diminish production, which is occasionally the consequence of a bad season,— such corn laws have the same effect during a course of years, in this respect, which a bad season has in a single year.

It is at all events indisputable that our importation of corn continues to increase. The advocates of a restrictive corn law are thus thrown into this dilemma: either the increasing deficiency of home growth arises from the absolute inability of our agriculturists to keep pace with the increasing demand of our population for food; or it arises from the operation of the corn laws. If the former be the case, what is to be said of the morality which seeks to aggravate the evils of scarcity by throwing from off its own shoulders the burdens of the state? Few taxes are paid by the growers of corn qua growers. The chief taxes paid by them are as consumers, in common with the rest of the community. To resort to legislative means, in order to keep up the price of corn by reason of such taxes, is to relieve the grower of corn to this extent, and to increase the burdens of the rest of the community in the same proportion. In principle it is the same with ani immunity from taxes enjoyed by a favoured class, which was a main ingredient in the first revolution in France, and has reduced Spain and Portugal from having been two of the finest to be two of the most beggarly kingdoms in Europe. Right never can come of wrong, especially where, as here, an attempt is made to counteract the natural course of things. In all such cases the consequences recoil upon the authors. This brings us to the other horn of the dilemma. No persons suffer so much from the operation of our corn laws as the growers of corn themselves. But, unfortunately, the rest of the community suffer with them.' pp. 35-37.

Mr. Mundell pleads strongly for a free trade in corn, both import and export, allowing a drawback upon the exportation, equal to the ad valorem duty levied upon the import, which he would fix at an eighth part of the value of the grain, according to the highest price in the London market in the preceding week.

OUR readers will of course expect us to report, in the present Number, respecting the Annuals, which, true to their season, are now in flower. They will, perhaps, anticipate that some