in
1750-1760 and 1760-1770 to L1: 19: 3-1/4 and L2: 11: 3-3/4, 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
L1,515,000, and in 1749 alone they amounted to L324,000. 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.

1791-1846.

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 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 L2: 6: 3, and in only three years of the twenty was the price a
fraction under L2. But the ideas in favour of greater freedom of trade,
of which the act of 1773 was an indication, and of which another
me