An Essay on the External Corn Trade |
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Common terms and phrases
200 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 rent restrictions rise seasons suits of clothing supply of corn surplus taxation taxes tillage tion tivation trade in corn unequal 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 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 353 - If England should have acquired such a degree of skill in manufactures that, with any given portion of her capital, she could prepare a quantity of cloth, for which the Polish cultivator would give a greater quantity of corn than she could, with the same portion of capital, raise from her own soil, then tracts of her territory, though they should be equal, nay, even though they should be superior, to the lands in Poland, will be neglected ; and a part of her supply of corn will be imported from that...
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 shown, 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 the imported article,...
Page 334 - If, in consequence of our skill in manufactures, any given portion of our labor and capital can, by working up cloth, obtain from Poland a thousand quarters of wheat, while it could raise, from our own soil, only nine hundred ; then, even on the agricultural theory, we must increase our wealth by being, to this extent, a manufacturing rather than an agricultural people.
Page 169 - No proposition admits of a more rigid demonstration, than that the highest rents are paid in countries in which manufacturing industry is carried to the greatest height. But it is obviously impossible that manufactures should continue to flourish in a country where restrictions on the importation of corn raise the value of raw produce in relation to wrought goods, and thereby depress manufacturing profits below the rate prevailing in the neighbouring countries. If we do not freely import foreign...
Page 440 - A man in distress for money pays more interest, owing to the usury laws, than he would if no such laws existed ; because now he is obliged to go to some of the disreputable money lenders to borrow, as he knows the respectable money lender will not break the laws of his country. The...