An Essay on the External Corn Trade

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Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1826 - Corn laws (Great Britain). - 416 pages
 

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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 - 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 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 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 303 - 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, they will allow prices to run up very high, before they come into the market ; and will feed it only in such quantities, as shall keep down competition against themselves, but not to that extent as will have any great effect...
Page vii - ... 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, be less than the comparative advantage of the domestic capitalist in producing the articles exported in exchange.
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 151 - ... more capital. Every five thousand pounds laid out on the land, not only repays the usual profits of stock, but generates an additional value, which goes to the landlord. And this additional value is not a mere benefit to a particular individual, or set of individuals, but affords the most steady home demand for the manufactures of the country, the most effective fund for its financial support, and the largest disposable force for its army and navy.

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