checks importation. Suppose importation stopped altogether in ordinary years; it being found that the million of quarters can be obtained, by a more elaborate cultivation, or by breaking up inferior land, at a less advance than ten shillings upon the previous price—say, for instance, five shillings a quarter. The revenue now obtains nothing, except from the extraordinary imports which may happen to take place in a season of scarcity. But the consumers pay every year a tax of five shillings on the whole twenty-one millions of quarters, amounting to £5,250,000 sterling. Of this the odd £250,000 goes to compensate the growers of the last million of quarters for the labor and capital wasted under the compulsion of the law. The remaining £5,000,000 go to enrich the landlords as before.
Such is the operation of what are technically termed corn laws, when first laid on; and such continues to be their operation so long as they have any effect at all in raising the price of corn. The difference between a country without corn laws and a country which has long had corn laws is not so much that the last has a higher price or a larger rental, but that it has the same price and the same rental with a smaller aggregate capital and a smaller population. The imposition of corn laws raises rents, but retards that progress of accumulation which would in no long period have raised them fully as much. The repeal of corn laws tends to lower rents, but it unchains a force which, in a progressive state of [pg 574] capital and population, restores and even increases the former amount.
What we have said of duties on importation generally is equally applicable to discriminating duties which favor importation from one place, or in one particular manner, in contradistinction to others; such as the preference given to the produce of a colony, or of a country with which there is