policy of the present
change, which is taking place in the Highlands, rest entirely upon
different grounds? Would it not be perfectly senseless in the
Highlanders to think only of those general principles which direct
them to employ the soil in the way that is best suited to it? If
supplies of corn could not be obtained with some degree of
steadiness and certainty from other quarters, would it not be
absolutely necessary for them to grow it themselves, however ill
adapted to it might be their soil and climate?

The same may be said of all the pasture districts of Great Britain,
compared with the surrounding corn countries. If they could only
obtain the superfluities of their neighbours, and were entitled to
no share of the produce when it was scarce, they could not certainly
devote themselves with any degree of safety to their present
occupations.

There is, on this account, a grand difference between the freedom of
the home trade in corn, and the freedom of the foreign trade. A
government of tolerable vigour can make the home trade in corn
really free. It can secure to the pasture districts, or the towns
that must be fed from a distance, their share of the general
produce, whether plentiful or scarce. It can set them quite at rest
about the power of exchanging the peculiar products of their own
labour for the other products which are necessary to them, and can
dispense, therefore, to all its subjects, the inestimable advantages
of an unrestricted intercourse.

But it is not in the power of any single nation to secure the
freedom of the foreign trade in corn. To accomplish this, the
concurrence of many others is necessary; and this concurrence, the
fears and jealousies so universally prevalent about the means of
subsistence, almost invariably prevent. There is hardly a nation in
Europe which does not occasionally exercise the power of stopping
entirely, or heavily taxing, its exports of grain, if prohibitions
do not form part of its general code of laws.

The question then before us is evidently a special, not a general
one. It is not a question between the advantages of a free trade,
and a system of restrictions; but between a specific system of
restrictions formed by ourselves for the purpose of rendering us, in
average years, nearly independent of foreign supplies, and the
specific system of restricted importations, which alone it is in our
power to obtain under the existing laws of France, and in the actual
s