were alike subjected to heavy duties—the need of the exchequer
being the paramount consideration, while the agriculturists were
no doubt pleased with the complete command secured
to them in the home market. This 1660–
1773.act was followed
by such high prices of corn, and so little advantage
to the revenue, that parliament in 1663 reduced the duties on
import to 9% ad valorem, while at the same time raising the
price at which export ceased to 48s., and reducing the duty
on export from 20s. to 5s. 4d. per quarter. In a few years
this was found to be too much free-trade for the agricultural
liking, and in 1670 prohibitory duties were re-imposed on import
when the home price was under 53s. 4d., and a duty of 8s.
between that price and 80s., with the usual make-weight in
favour of home supply, that export should be prohibited when
the price was 53s. 4d. and upwards. But complaints of the
decline of agriculture continued to be as rife under this act as
under the others, till on the accession of William and Mary, the
landed interest, taking advantage of the Revolution as they
had taken advantage of the Restoration to promote their own
interests, took the new and surprising step of enacting a bounty
on the export of grain. This evil continued to affect the corn
laws of the kingdom, varied, on one occasion at least, with the
further complication of bounties on import, until the 19th century.
The duties on export being abolished, while the heavy duties
on import were maintained, this is probably the most one-sided
form which the British corn laws ever assumed, but it was
attended with none of the advantages anticipated. The prices
of corn fell, instead of rising. There had occurred at the period
of the Revolution a depreciation of the money of the realm,
analogous in one respect to that which marked the first era of
the corn statutes (1436–1551), and forming one of the greatest
difficulties which the government of William had to encounter.
The coin of the realm was greatly debased, and as rapidly as
the mint sent out money of standard weight and purity, it was
melted down, and disappeared from the circulation. The influx
of silver from South America to Europe had spent its action on
prices before the middle of the century; the precious metals
had again hardened in value; and for forty years before the
Revolution the price of corn had been steadily falling in money
price. The liberty of exporting wool had also now been cut
down before the English manufactures were able to take up the
home supply, and agriculturists were consequently forced to
extend their tillage. When the current coin of the kingdom
became wholly debased by clipping and other knaveries, there
ensued both irregularity and inflation of nominal prices, and
the producers and consumers of corn found themselves equally
ill at ease. The farmers complained that the home-market for
their produce was unremunerative and unsatisfactory; the
masses of the people complained with no less reason that the
money wages of labour could not purchase them the usual
necessaries of life. Macaulay, in his History of England, says
of this period, with little exaggeration, that “the price of the
necessaries of life, of shoes, of ale, of oatmeal, rose fast. The
labourer found that the bit of metal which, when he received it,
was called a shilling, would hardly, when he purchased a pot
of beer or a loaf of rye bread, go as far as sixpence.” The state
of agriculture could not be prosperous under these conditions.
But when the government of William surmounted this difficulty
of the coinage, as they did surmount it, under the guidance of
Sir Isaac Newton, with remarkable statesmanship, it necessarily
followed that prices, so far from rising, declined, because, for one
reason, they were now denominated in a solid metallic value.
The rise of prices of corn attending the first years of the export
bounty was consequently of very brief duration. The average
price of wheat in the Winchester market, which in the ten years
1600–1699 was £2 : 10s., fell in the ten years 1716–1725 to
£1 : 5 : 4, and in the ten years 1746–1755 to £1 : 1 : 2¾. The
system of corn law established in the reign of William and Mary
was probably the most perfect to be conceived for advancing
the agricultural interest of any country. Every stroke of the
legislature seemed complete to this end. Yet it wholly failed
of its purpose. The price of wheat again rose in 1750–1760 and
1760–1770 to £1 : 19 : 3¼ and £2 : 11 : 3¾, but many causes
had meanwhile been at work, as invariably happens in such
economic developments, the operation of which no statutes
could embrace, either to control or to prevent. Between the
reign of William and Mary and that of George III., the question
of bounty on export of grain had, in the general progress of the
country, fallen into the background, while that of the heavy
embargoes on import had come to the front. Therefore it is
that Burke’s Act of 1773, as a deliberate attempt to bring the
corn laws into some degree of reason and order, is worthy of
special mention. This statute permitted the import of foreign
wheat at a nominal duty of 6d. when the home price was 48s.
per quarter, and it stopped both the liberty to export and the
bounty on export together when the home price was 44s. per
quarter. The one blemish of this statute was the stopping
export and cutting off bounty on export at the same point of
price.
Few questions have been more discussed or more differently interpreted than the elaborate system of corn laws dating from the reign of William and Mary. So careful an observer as Malthus was of opinion that the bounty on export had enlarged the area of subsistence. That it had large operation is sufficiently attested by the fact that, in the years from 1740 to 1751, bounties were paid out of the exchequer to the amount of £1,515,000, and in 1749 alone they amounted to £324,000. But the trade thus forced was of no permanence, and the British exports of corn, which reached a maximum of 1,667,778 quarters in 1749–1750, had fallen to 600,000 quarters in 1760 and continued to decrease.
Burke’s Act lasted long enough to introduce a regular import
of foreign grain, varying with the abundance or scarcity of the
home harvest, yet establishing in the end a systematic
preponderance of imports over exports. The period,
moreover, was marked by great 1791–
1846.agricultural improvements,
by extensive reclamation of waste lands, and by an
increased home produce of wheat, in the twenty years from
1773 to 1793, of nearly 2,000,000 quarters. Nor had the course
of prices been unsatisfactory. The average price of British
wheat in the twenty years was £2 : 6 : 3, and in only three
years of the twenty was the price a fraction under £2. But the
ideas in favour of greater freedom of trade, of which the act of
1773 was an indication, and of which another memorable example
was given in Pitt’s commercial treaty with France, were overwhelmed
in the extraordinary excitement caused by the French
Revolution, and all the old corn law policy was destined to have
a sudden revival. The landowners and farmers complained that
an import of foreign grain at a nominal duty of 6d., when the
price of wheat was only 48s., deprived them of the ascending
scale of prices when it seemed due; and on this instigation an
act was passed in 1791, whereby the price at which importation
could proceed at the nominal duty of 6d. was raised to 54s., with
a duty of 2s. 6d. from 54s. to 50s., and at 50s. and under 50s. a
prohibitory duty of 24s. 3d. The bounty on export was maintained
by this act, but exportation was allowed without bounty
till the price reached 46s.; and the permission accorded by the
statute of 1773 to import foreign corn at any price, to be reexported
duty free, was modified by a warehouse duty of 2s. 6d.
in addition to the duties on import payable at the time of sale,
when the corn, instead of being re-exported, happened to be sold
for home consumption. The legislative vigilance in this statute
to prevent foreign bread from reaching the home consumer is
remarkable. There were deficient home harvests for some years
after 1791, particularly in 1795 and 1797, and parliament was
forced to the new expedient of granting high bounties on importation.
At this period the country was involved in a great
war; all the customary commercial relations were violently
disturbed; freight, insurance and other charges on import and
export were multiplied fivefold; heavier and heavier taxes were
imposed; and the capital resources of the kingdom were poured
with a prodigality without precedent into the war channels.
The consequence was that the price of corn, as of all other
commodities, rose greatly: and the Bank of England having
