An Essay on the External Corn Trade |
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500 quarters abundant accumulations advance advantages agricultural agricultural produce artificial average bales of cloth beneficial capitalist carriage cause circumstances commerce commodities competition consequence Corn Laws cost crops cultivation deficient demand diminished divisions of employment duction effect England equal equalising exchangeable value expenditure expense exportation facturing fall farmer fifty quarters food and material forced foreign corn foreign grower free external trade free trade given quantity grain greater home market hundred suits importation of foreign increase inferior lands inferior soils injurious labour and capital manu material equivalent merchant natural necessary obtain occasioned Poland population price of corn principle proportion protecting duties purchase quantity of labour quarters of corn rate of profit raw produce reduced regulate render rent restrictions rise seasons suits of clothing supply of corn surplus taxation taxes tillage tion tivation trade in corn value of corn value of money value of raw wages wealth wrought
Popular passages
Page 138 - Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth, which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.
Page 66 - The nature of things has stamped upon corn a real value, which cannot be altered by merely altering its money price. No bounty upon exportation, no monopoly of the home market, can raise that value. The freest competition cannot lower it.
Page 200 - Were those high duties and prohibitions taken away all at once, cheaper foreign goods of the same kind might be poured so fast into the home market, as to deprive all at once many thousands of our people of their ordinary employment and means of subsistence.
Page 150 - No equal quantity of productive labour employed in manufactures can ever occasion so great a reproduction. In them nature does nothing; man does all; and the reproduction must always be in proportion to the strength of the agents that occasion it.
Page 3 - ... high and low lands, upon grounds that are disposed to be too wet, and upon those that are disposed to be too dry, either the drought or the rain which is hurtful to one part of the country is favourable to another; and though both in the wet and in the dry season the crop is a good deal less than in one more properly tempered, yet in both what is lost in one part of the country is in some measure compensated by what is gained in the other. In rice countries, where the crop not only requires a...
Page 451 - The study of political economy, if it did not teach the way in which labour may obtain an adequate reward, might serve to gratify a merely speculative curiosity, but could scarcely conduce to any purposes of practical utility. It claims the peculiar attention of the benevolent and good, mainly because it explains the causes which depress and elevate wages, and thereby points out the means by which we may mitigate the distress and improve the condition of the great majority of mankind.
Page 200 - Humanity may in this case require that the freedom of trade should be restored only by slow gradations, and with a good deal of reserve and circumspection.
Page vii - In the earlier edition of the Essay on the Corn Trade, it was shewn, the Author believes for the first time, that a permanently high scale of general prices, from whatever cause arising, cannot depress domestic industry by encouraging the importation of cheaper foreign articles ; and that commodities, the cost of producing which is greater in foreign countries than at home, may, nevertheless, be imported, provided the comparative disadvantage of the foreign capitalist in producing...
Page 303 - ... a higher price. Nor can we conceive a more palpable absurdity, than to suppose that the price of any article can be lowered by mixing it with another of greater value *." The advocates of restricted trade contend that " While we depend, in any degree, upon a foreign supply of corn, the prices are constantly governed by the principle of scarcity, and not, as they otherwise would be, by the principle of abundance. The object of importing merchants being to import with the greatest possible profit,...
Page 185 - ... promote our manufactures and extend our trade. So long as we co-operate with nature, we cannot be undersold by others ; while, from the reciprocity of commerce, every increase in the productive powers of labour which should enable us to consume, or, which is the same thing in a commercial point of view, to furnish an equivalent for an increased quantity of foreign commodities, would occasion a proportional enlargement of the market...