of one year had not been more or less hindered
from relieving the scarcity of another. It
is in this set of men, accordingly, that I have
observed the greatest zeal for the continuance
or renewal of the bounty.
Our country gentlemen, when they imposed
the high duties upon the exportation of
corn, which in times of moderate plenty amount
to a prohibition, and when they established
the bounty, seem to have imitated the
conduct of our manufacturers. By the one
institution, they secured to themselves the monopoly
of the home market, and by the other
they endeavoured to prevent that market from
ever being overstocked with their commodity.
By both they endeavoured to raise its real value,
in the same manner as our manufacturers had,
by the like institutions, raised the real value
of many different sorts of manufactured goods.
They did not, perhaps, attend to the great and
essential difference which nature has established
between corn and almost every other sort
of goods. When, either by the monopoly of
the home market, or by a bounty upon exportation,
you enable our woollen or linen manufacturers
to sell their goods for somewhat a
better price than they otherwise could get for
them, you raise, not only the nominal, but the
real price of those goods; you render them
equivalent to a greater quantity of labour and
subsistence; you increase not only the nominal,
but the real profit, the real wealth and
revenue of these manufacturers; and you enable
them, either to live better themselves, or
to employ a greater quantity of labour in those
particular manufactures. You really encourage
those manufactures, and direct towards
them a greater quantity of the industry of the
country than what would properly go to them
of its own accord. But when, by the like institutions,
you raise the nominal or money
price of corn, you do not raise its real value;
you do not increase the real wealth, the real
revenue, either of our farmers or country gentlemen;
you do not encourage the growth of
corn, because you do not enable them to maintain
and employ more labourers in raising it.
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. Through the world
in general, that value is equal to the quantity
of labour which it can maintain, and in every
particular place it is equal to the quantity of
labour which it can maintain in the way,
whether liberal, moderate, or scanty, in which
labour is commonly maintained in that place.
Woollen or linen cloth are not the regulating
commodities by which the real value of all
other commodities must be finally measured
and determined; corn is. The real value of
every other commodity is finally measured and
determined by the proportion which its average
money price bears to the average money
price of corn. The real value of corn does
not vary with those variations in its average
money price, which sometimes occur from one
century to another; it is the real value of silver
which varies with them.
Bounties upon the exportation of any home-made
commodity are liable, first, to that general
objection which may be made to all the
different expedients of the mercantile system;
the objection of forcing some part of the industry
of the country into a channel less advantageous
than that in which it would run
of its own accord; and, secondly, to the particular
objection of forcing it not only into a
channel that is less advantageous, but into
one that is actually disadvantageous; the trade
which cannot be carried on but by means of a
bounty being necessarily a losing trade. The
bounty upon the exportation of corn is liable
to this further objection, that it can in no respect
promote the raising of that particular
commodity of which it was meant to encourage
the production. When our country gentlemen,
therefore, demanded the establishment
of the bounty, though they acted in imitation
of our merchants and manufacturers, they did
not act with that complete comprehension of
their own interest, which commonly directs
the conduct of those two other orders of people.
They loaded the public revenue with a
very considerable expense: they imposed a
very heavy tax upon the whole body of the
people; but they did not, in any sensible degree,
increase the real value of their own commodity;
and by lowering somewhat the real
value of silver, they discouraged, in some degree,
the general industry of the country, and,
instead of advancing, retarded more or less
the improvement of their own lands, which
necessarily depend upon the general industry
of the country.
To encourage the production of any commodity,
a bounty upon production, one should
imagine, would have a more direct operation
than one upon exportation. It would, besides,
impose only one tax upon the people,
that which they must contribute in order to
pay the bounty. Instead of raising, it would
tend to lower the price of the commodity in
the home market; and thereby, instead of imposing
a second tax upon the people, it might,
at least in part, repay them for what they had
contributed to the first. Bounties upon production,
however, have been very rarely granted.
The prejudices established by the commercial
system have taught us to believe, that
national wealth arises more immediately from
exportation than from production. It has
been more favoured, accordingly, as the more
immediate means of bringing money into the
country. Bounties upon production, it has
been said too, have been found by experience
more liable to frauds than those upon exportation.
How far this is true, I know not.