Grain trade

“ The bread stuffs, as they are popularly termed, particularly wheat and wheat flour, maize, and rice, form very important articles of commerce, and enter largely into cultivation in various countries for home consumption and export. Russia, India, and the United States, carry on a very considerable trade in grain with other countries. Our local production being insufficient for food and manufactures, we import yearly immense quantities of grain and flour. ”

“ Free trade in grain has been in operation just three years. We pass over the great importation of the year 1847, when, under the influence of the panic, and high prices arising from the Irish famine, no less than 12,000,000 quarters of grain were imported in fifteen months, at a cost of £31,000,000, nearly the whole of which was paid in specie. ”

“ In the next place, the purchase of so very large a portion as a fourth of the annual subsistence—not from our own cultivators, who consume at an average five or six pounds a-head of our manufactures, but from foreign growers, who consume little or nothing—has had a most serious effect upon the home trade. The introduction of 12,000,000 or 13,000,000 quarters of grain a-year into our markets, from countries whose importation of our manufactures is almost equal to nothing, is a most dreadfully depressing circumstance to our manufacturers. ”

“ Though a little flurry in the price of wheat cannot of itself make prosperity, the demands on our carrying trade for the shipment of the grain to foreign countries has brought a great deal of business to our shores. ”

“ Supposing that an equal amount of other kinds of grain has gone out of cultivation, which is a most moderate supposition, seeing that 10,000,000 quarters of foreign grain are now annually imported, when there were not 2,000,000 before, we have 6,000,000 less quarters of grain annually raised in Great Britain than was done before Free Trade was introduced! The defalcation has been nearly as great in the supplies of cattle, sheep, and other animals brought to the English market. Beyond all doubt the value of the produce that is raised has sunk a fourth. ”

“ The average quantity imported one year with another amounts only, according to the very well informed author of the tracts upon the corn trade, to twenty-three thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight quarters of all sorts of grain, and does not exceed the five hundred and seventy-first part of the annual consumption. But as the bounty upon corn occasions a greater exportation in years of plenty, so it must of consequence occasion a greater importation in years of scarcity, than in the actual state of tillage would otherwise take place. ”

“ While our manufacturing enterprises rank us next to England among the world's manufacturing producers, yet more than nine-tenths of our export trade with foreign countries is in agricultural products, such as: wheat, corn, cotton, tobacco, and beef and pork, which, under the present system of farming, are as much agricultural productions as the grain on which the ox and the hog are fattened. ”

“ It would take that time to beat down the British farmer; to convince the cultivators of inferior lands of the folly of attempting a competition with the great grain districts of the Continent. Providence has done the thing at once. We have got on at railway speed to the blessings of the new system. Free-trade was to lead to the much-desired substitution of six million quarters of home for six million quarters of foreign grain in three years. ”

“ Paul Boards of Trade and the New York Produce Exchange are the three great agencies for dealing in grain in the United States. 225 Buffalo, Duluth, Baltimore and Philadelphia are also important markets. Adjuncts to these markets are the great terminal elevators capable of holding almost indefinitely enormous quantities of wheat and other grain. On the Pacific Coast all the wheat is handled in the bags, as is the custom in the other markets of the world. ”

“ Not only are ten millions of quarters of grain, being a full fifth of the national consumption, now imported from abroad, but nearly the half of this immense importation is of wheat, the staple food of the people, of which a third comes from foreign parts. ”

“ The fourth and most important stated the average price of British corn at which free importation was to be allowed, and below which it was to be prohibited, and this for wheat was fixed at eighty shillings per quarter. An exception was made in favour of grain produced in the British colonies, which might be imported when British grown wheat was at sixty-seven shillings. ”

“ Lastly, Countries which have vast inland tracts, like Russia, Austria, France, and America, especially if no extensive system of water communication exists in their interior, have little reason to apprehend injury from the most unrestricted commerce in grain; because the cost of inland carriage on so bulky and heavy an article as corn is so considerable, that the produce of foreign harvests can never penetrate far into the interior, or come to supply a large portion of the population with food. ”

“ My belief is that if this country imported one or two millions of quarters of wheat from foreign lands, the consumption would increase to that extent, for it is astonishing how much consumption increases where the price of corn is low, and where trade is healthy and prosperous. ”

“ Such deviations from the practice of merely selling grain and meat off the farm have much extended in recent years, and will probably continue to do so under the altered conditions of British agriculture, determined by very large imports of grain, increasing imports of meat and of other products of stock-feeding, and very large imports of cattle-food and other agricultural produce. ”

“ We shall have an enormously large surplus of breadstuffs for exportation, and it happens that in this period of our abundance crop failures or shortages in India, in Russia, in France, in Germany, and England have opened a market that will require the last bushel of grain we have to sell. ”

“ The unlimited importation of cheap grain from Spain, Egypt, Sicily, and Lybia, and nothing else.
2. In the next place, even if the gratuitous distributions of grain had embraced twenty times the number which they did, nothing can be clearer than that the effect on agriculture is the same, whether cheap foreign grain is imported by the private importer, or bought and distributed by the government. If the home-grower loses his market, it is the same thing to him whether he does so from the effects of private importation or public distribution ”

“ We see then that the nature of this elementary principle of society, of which we never ought to lose sight, is such that a sufficient market is always provided at home, for all the corn which the land, with the utmost: exertions of the farmer, can ever be made to produce; that the demand will always be proportioned to the supply, however great that supply may be; and that a foreign market can never be wanted for any quantity of corn that can be regularly produced. A foreign market can never be necessary, but to take off the surplus of an extraordinary year. ”

“ Whatever corn, therefore, is at any time imported into Great Britain must come into it purchased at this medium price, and loaded with all the expence of freight and insurance from the country where it is bought. And corn is an article of so much bulk in proportion to the value, that this expence must always bear a pretty high proportion to the original price. ”

“ Cheap prices of grain are like the Amreeta cap in Kehama; the greatest of all blessings is the greatest of all curses, according as they arise from magnitude of domestic production, or magnitude of foreign importation. Of the first we had an example during the five fine years in succession, from 1830 to 1835, during which the foreign importation was practically abolished by the abundant harvests, and consequent high duty on grain under the sliding scale. ”

“ Under these laws, foreign corn is bought at low prices in years of plenty, bonded in our warehouses, and thrown into our markets at a moment when a bad harvest occasions a rise in the price of grain, necessary to the remuneration of our farmers, thus, in fact, in a very great degree, placing them at the mercy of the speculators, who, by various means, influence the prices to suit their own purposes; to such a system the admission of foreign corn, on a fixed duty, would be far preferable. ”

“ That therefore the encouragement of agriculture may be greater when the price of corn is low than when it is high? Is it found that, the profit of other trades rises in proportion to the price of the article? ”

“ But the value of crops, and the expense of raising each, should be duly estimated in making selections for rotations. Let us say, for instance, that the average crops of wheat, barley, and Indian corn, at their greatest extent, may average 50 dollars in value to the acre, after the grain is ready for market; crops of rye, oats and peas, not more than two thirds of this amount; buck-wheat, considerably less. From lands suitable for ruta baga, or mangel wurzel, it would seem that from five to six hundred bushels to the acre may be expected with good culture ”

“ And observe, the countries from which we have imported so largely last year of grain and articles of subsistence, have not only not suffered by the scarcity general on the Continent, but have profited immensely by it. America has been blessed with a splendid crop of every species of grain; and, in consequence of the famine in Ireland and severe scarcity in France, prices of grain have risen to triple their former amount in the United States. ”

“ No one however will hesitate to allow all that is necessary for our argument, that the tendency of the species to multiply is much greater than the rapidity with which there is any chance that the fruits of the earth will be multiplied in Britain, or any other country in Europe, What is the consequence of this great law of society, but that the production of corn creates the market for corn? ”

“ In 1822 a statute was passed reducing the limit of prices at which importation could proceed to 70s. for wheat, 35s. for barley, 25s. for oats; but behind the apparent relaxation was a new scale of import duties, by which foreign grain was subjected to heavy three-month duties up to a price of 85s.,—17s. when wheat was 70s., 12s. when between 70s. and 80s., and 10s. when 85s., showing the grasping spirit of the would-be monopolizers of the home supply of corn, and their reluctance to believe in a lower range of value for corn as for all other commodities. ”

“ This determines the cheapness the price of the raw material; it determines therefore the price of the manufacture. When this costs little at home, it can be sold with great advantage abroad; it overcomes all competition; and the greatest quantity of it may be disposed of. When the price of corn on the other hand is high, this raises price of the raw material of all manufactures, of the labour employed in them, and by consequence of the manufactured commodity ”

“ Formerly—in the first years of the century, up to 1842—the farmer had to contend against a foreign supply of grain amounting to little more than 1,000,000 quarters per annum—now, in some cases, under obligations contracted on the faith of protection to native industry, he is called upon to make the vain struggle against an inundation of foreign corn amounting to upwards of 1,000,000 quarters per month! He cannot, it is evident, maintain the contest long. ”

“ Why, if a bounty on the exportation of corn be so favourable to the production, of corn, should not a bounty on the exportation of wool be favourable to the production of wool? Why, if the exportation of corn have such an effect to produce plenty of corn at home, should not the exportation of wool have an effect to produce plenty of wool at home? ”

“ If we consider too the vastly increased consumption of finer food for man, and of corn for horses, to which our great wealth has given occasion, we shall see how a still greater quantity of corn is rendered necessary; and from all these circumstances we shall be forced to conclude that unless agriculture had made rapid advances during the period since the suspension of the bounty on exportation, a much greater importation must have been necessary than we have experienced. ”

“ But in all cases the importation of foreign corn must fail to answer nationally, if it is not so much cheaper than the corn that can be grown at home, as to equal both the profits and the rent of the grain which it displaces. ”

“ We have fortunately a series of facts which place this matter beyond all doubt, and prove most decisively that it is not to the bounty on the exportation of corn that we are to ascribe the comparatively slow progress of agricultural industry. ”

“ They will readily admit too that this country is now much farther forward as a manufacturing country than as an agricultural country; for this is the thing of which they complain. The particular point of time likewise at which manufacturing industry got before agricultural, they will probably be willing to grant, was that time when exportation of corn began to be changed for importation. ”

“ The returns prove that ever since the duties on foreign grain became nominal, in the beginning of February last, the importation of corn and flour into Great Britain and Ireland has gone on steadily at the rate of 1,200,000 quarters a-month; and that now seven-eighths of the supply of the metropolis, and of all our other great towns, comes from foreign parts.28 How British agriculture is to go on staggering under such a frightful load of foreign importation into its best markets, it is not difficult to foresee. ”