and with a good deal more of reflection upon the principles that ought to regulate the constitution of courts of justice; but I own that my opinion is, without any hesitation, that the requiring of the jury to agree before they give their verdict, and the taking it from them as being said by them all, is a highly valuable part of our existing system.

There is certainly no foundation for the distinction with which I am honoured, it seems, at Edinburgh, of being a convert to the Corn Bill. The more I have read upon the subject, and the more I hear upon it, I get more firmly fixed in my original opinion, that nothing should be done; of course it will be carried with a loud clamour, and with much abuse of all lackland theorists. It would be as absurd to expect men to be reasonable about corn, as to be reasonable in matters of religion.

I do not imagine any new discovery is made about the relation of the price of labour to that of grain, or the effects of scarcity or plenty upon wages. The principles, upon which all such effects must depend, are obvious to every one who understands the operation of demand and supply upon prices; indeed, they are all an application of that single principle. A great many cases are necessary to be put, in order to distinguish the various effects of scarcity or plenty upon wages, according to the nature of the particular employment in which labour is to be paid for; but even when the effects are the most opposite, it is still the operation of the same principle. All this is stated well enough by Adam Smith, towards the end of his chapter on the Wages of Labour.

The most important convert the landholders have got, is Malthus, who has now declared himself in favour of

their Bill; and, to be sure, there is not a better or more informed judgment, and it is the single authority which staggers me. But those who have looked closely into his philosophy will admit, that there is always a leaning in favour of the efficacy of laws; and his early bias was for corn laws in particular. It was a great effort of candour, in truth, to suspend his decision upon this particular measure so long. I think I could demonstrate, from his own principles of population, that if this measure is effectual at all, it must be attended with great misery among the manufacturing classes, as well as among the labourers in husbandry; and with a violent forced alteration of that proportion, in this country, between agricultural and manufacturing population and capital, which the freedom of both has adjusted, and would continue to maintain, better and more lightly for all the people, than can be effected by all the wisdom of all the squires of the island, with the political arithmeticians to boot.

Affectionately yours,

FRA. HORNER.

LETTER CCXXIX. TO THE REV. T. R. MALTHUS.

My dear Malthus,

12th February, 1815.

I have to thank you for sending me your two new publications upon the corn question, which I have read, and am still reading. You will think me very hardened, but I must own that my old faith is not shaken by your reasonings; on the contrary, I am even so perverse, as to think I have discovered, among your ingenious deductions respecting rent, some fresh and cogent arguments in favour of a free corn trade for this country; by which I always mean, as free a trade as we can

secure by our own good sense, however it may be impaired by the deficiency of our neighbours in that qualification. If the consequence of "high farming" and curious cultivation be a progressive rise of the price of produce, an importation of partial supplies from countries, which by a ruder agriculture can furnish it cheaper, seems the provision laid by nature for checking too exclusive an employment of capital upon the land least fit for culture. It would be a palpable sacrifice of the end to the means, if, for the sake of extending our most finished husbandry to every sterile ridge that can be forced to yield something, we impose upon the whole body of the people extravagant prices for the necessaries of life. Nor do I see, upon your peculiar principles, what other result there would be, if Dartmoor and Blackstone Edge were laid out in terraces of garden-ground, but a population always in some peril of being starved, if their rulers will not let them eat the superfluity of their neighbours. I have not leisure to write out in any systematic form what has occurred to me, but I wish you would allow me to suggest some objections to you, and to request farther explanations from you, on some points which I have marked in a very hasty perusal of "The grounds of your opinion." I mean to put them down. without any attention to order, and will stuff as many of them into this letter as I have time for; I have, in truth, very little time for these speculations.

Why do you say, p. 28., that "in all common years, France will furnish us with a large proportion of our supplies?" This affirmation is not founded upon the parliamentary evidence, which bears the contrary way. The witnesses were not examined till a considerable time after the signature of the Definitive Treaty; yet, in stating the various countries from which we are to

look for imports of grain, during the subsistence of peace, none of them ever name France, or seem to think of it; although a great many foreign corn factors are brought forward, and some whose experience goes back for years, previous to the commencement of the long war. They say indeed expressly, that they know but one instance of an import from France, which took place after the harvest of 1809, and until the prohibition in July 1810. That exportation was allowed by the French government, to relieve the pressure of an excessive plenty. But why did not the same motive operate more frequently, if you are right in what you state, p. 13., that "prices have been often as low during the last ten years as they were after the last harvest?" And, by the way, in your statement of the French prices in the same passage, which is made, of course, for the sake of comparisons with our own, should you not have included the difference of exchange, when you converted their money into ours? You talk of the law, made by the two Chambers last summer, for the regulation of their export price, as if it had cast quite a new light upon the whole subject, and as if it, for the first time, had admonished you of having too precipitately made admissions of the favourable effects of a free trade. Had not the French always such a regulation, if not the very same?

You state, p. 5., that, by the recent improvements of agriculture," we had become much less dependent upon foreign supplies for our support." What proof is there of this? The excess of imports does not appear to have sensibly decreased of very late years; it never was so high as in 1810. The small quantity imported in 1812 (the accounts make it double what you state it to have been) is in the following page, not consistently, I think,

used by you, not as a consequence of the increase of our home growth, but as a proof of the difficulty of importation. A fact of this nature cannot tell both ways, it seems to me.

Speaking from recollection only, I should not say that it is a result to be gathered from the evidence before Parliament, that "a continuation of low prices would, in spite of a diminution of rents, destroy farming capital, and diminish produce." (p. 5.) The witnesses, who make this prediction, generally at least, if not uniformly, speak upon the supposition of the present rents being still to be paid. I may observe, too, that they generally take for granted, which is more fallacious, that with low prices, and continued low prices, all the expences and outgoings of a farm are still to keep at their present rate; and so they prove, demonstrably to their own conviction, that a farmer will never be remunerated if he gets but Ss. a bushel for his wheat at market, while he is feeding all his ploughmen, and buying his seeds, and paying all the auxiliary labour of the farm, with wheat at 12s. a bushel.

You have made a fair allowance for the partiality and interest of those who were called upon to give evidence. You thought it would be indecent to give the same indulgence, or rather you could make no allowance for the bias of those who were appointed to take the evidence. There are some very gross instances of this: see, in our Commons' Committee, how they dispatch Charles Mant, when he hints that the rate of the protecting price should be estimated, not according to the present expences, but according to that very fall of grain and labour, which are anticipated; they huddle up that subject, and pass on in a hurry to other matters.

I think some portion of the same fallacy, which I last