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peculiar severity upon the English agriculturist. It depresses prices just when his stock of corn is largest, and when he is most anxious to realise;—and raises them when he has none to sell.[1] This is not an accidental operation: it is inherent in the nature of a sliding-scale. In five years out of six, prices are highest just before the harvest, because then the stock of wheat in the country is the lowest; and they fall immediately after the harvest, from the opposite reason. We give in a note a table illustrative of this fact from 1829 to 1841,[2] showing that the average price has invariably fallen about harvest-time nearly eight per cent, or from 60s. 4d. to 55s. 9d. a quarter. In the present year, this result has been still more remarkably brought out. The harvest was unusually early, and the stocks of farmers more than usually exhausted. On July 9th the weekly average was 65s. 8d.; on September 10th, when the harvest was generally got in, and when farmers in the south were ready to bring their wheat to market, it had dropped to 51s. 6d.—a fall of nearly 22 per cent!
Now that this fall is to be attributed chiefly, though not altogether, to the operation of the sliding-scale, is evident from the fact that it is equally observable in defective as in abundant years. But for the sliding-scale, a rise in price would naturally be the immediate consequence of a deficient harvest. But the duty being always lowest when the price is highest, and prices having, as we have just seen, generally reached their maximum in August or September, the whole
- ↑ "The sudden admission of so large a quantity of foreign wheat in September 1838 [1,513,113 qrs. in one week] had the effect, notwithstanding the ascertained deficiency of our own growth, of depressing markets; so that the average price, which on the 24th of August had been 77s. declined within the four following weeks to 61s. 10d.—so that whereas the previous rise to 77s. was for the benefit only of the wealthier farmers who had been able to hold their stocks of the crop of 1837 to the last, the subsequent fall was to the detriment of the numerous class of small farmers, who, having by that time got their crops in everywhere south of the Humber, were threshing out, and as usual bringing the earliest supplies to market."—Tooke, III. p. 30.
- ↑
Year. Average Price of July & Aug. Average Price of Sept. & Oct.
