obtain the superfluities of their neighbours, and were entitled to
no share of the produce when it was scarce, they could not certainly
devote themselves with any degree of safety to their present
occupations.

There is, on this account, a grand difference between the freedom of
the home trade in corn, and the freedom of the foreign trade. A
government of tolerable vigour can make the home trade in corn
really free. It can secure to the pasture districts, or the towns
that must be fed from a distance, their share of the general
produce, whether plentiful or scarce. It can set them quite at rest
about the power of exchanging the peculiar products of their own
labour for the other products which are necessary to them, and can
dispense, therefore, to all its subjects, the inestimable advantages
of an unrestricted intercourse.

But it is not in the power of any single nation to secure the
freedom of the foreign trade in corn. To accomplish this, the
concurrence of many others is necessary; and this concurrence, the
fears and jealousies so universally prevalent about the means of
subsistence, almost invariably prevent. There is hardly a nation in
Europe which does not occasionally exercise the power of stopping
entirely, or heavily taxing, its exports of grain, if prohibitions
do not form part of its general code of laws.

The question then before us is evidently a special, not a general
one. It is not a question between the advantages of a free trade,
and a system of restrictions; but between a specific system of
restrictions formed by ourselves for the purpose of rendering us, in
average years, nearly independent of foreign supplies, and the