Sir George Grant Suttie

Name: Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of Grain in Britain than on the the Continent
Author: Sir George Grant Suttie

Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

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“Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of Grain in Britain than on the the Continent”, is a work by Sir George Grant Suttie. It explores elements such as Britain, grain and higher average price.

Quotes from Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of… (Sir George Grant Suttie)

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ The real wages, therefore, the quantity of wheat the labourers could purchase, was double in Britain what it was in Prussia. In a national point of view, labour is the true standard of value; if it is admitted that labour in Britain exchanges for a greater quantity of grain than it does in Prussia, it follows that grain is cheaper in Britain.
I shall now advert to what may almost be termed a fourth cause for the higher average price of grain in Britain—the cultivation of poor land. This the abolitionists maintain to be the necessary and natural consequence of monopoly. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ Now, I believe it will be admitted, that at no period of the history of Britain has the average price of grain so far exceeded the price on the Continent as during the present century; and I think it will also be admitted, that at no period of the history of Britain, or of any other nation, has so rapid an increase taken place in the amount of the population, in the wealth, and, above all, in the amount of taxation actually levied from the people. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ If, therefore the manufacturers complain, with justice, that the higher rate of taxation, by raising wages, prevents them from competing with continental manufacturers, the same argument applies to the agriculturist, only with infinitely greater force, in proportion to the trifling assistance which machinery has as yet afforded to manual labour in the production of food. The whole population of Britain would not be able to do for the manufacturers in a year what the steam engine does for them in a day ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ But even if we admit that a great reduction in the value of the agricultural produce in Britain would not make it more difficult to collect the immense revenue required by this country, still the debt is considered to press with sufficient weight on the energies of the country as it is. As a permanent reduction in the value of the agricultural produce of Britain would give the national creditor the power to purchase a much larger quantity of it than he now enjoys, to that extent it would increase the pressure of the debt, by adding most materially to its real value. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ They say the people have not been absolutely starved, but their food has been raised on poor land by an immense and unnecessary expenditure of labour, and their infallible remedy is to throw these poor lands, amounting to a half, a third, or a fourth of the soils of Britain, according to the theory of the different writers, out of cultivation. Import, they say, the cheap grain, the produce of the fertile soils of Prussia and Poland, which being cheaper must be the produce of much less labour. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ Divide the quarter of wheat, at the average price of each country, by the wages of each country, that will give the real wages of each. Fortunately, Mr Jacob's report on the Corn Trade affords the most satisfactory means for instituting a comparison both as to the price of grain and the rate of real wages in Britain and in those countries. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ When what he terms artificial sterility is produced by the pressure of taxation on the land, the Colonel does not explain, in his elaborate work, how, if the cause of higher price is taxation, the same amount of [Pg 12] taxation is to be paid by the land, when the value of its produce is reduced from the effects of importation. ”

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Source: Gutenberg

Sir George Grant Suttie, Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of…

“ Colonel Torrance, who, I believe, is considered a high authority with the abolitionists, states, that if, by taxing our land, we increase the expense of growing corn at home beyond the expense of producing it in other countries, our prices will be higher than theirs. ”

Sir George Grant Suttie

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Quotes from Letter to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Melbourne on the Cause of the Higher Average Price of… (Sir George Grant Suttie)

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