the General Report of Scotland.

11. "Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent, and the
Principles by which it is regulated."

12. I was not prepared to expect (as I intimated in the
Observations) so sudden a fall in the price of labour as has already
taken place. This fall has been occasioned, not so much by the low
price of corn, as by the sudden stagnation of agricultural work,
occasioned by a more sudden check to cultivation than I foresaw.

13. I am strongly disposed to believe, that it is owning to the
unwillingness of governments to allow the free egress of their corn,
when it is scarce, that nations are practically so little dependent
upon each other for corn, as they are found to be. According to all
general principles they ought to be more dependent. But the great
fluctuations in the price of corn, occasioned by this unwillingness,
tend to throw each country back again upon its internal resources.
This was remarkably the case with us in 1800 and 1801, when the very
high price, which we paid for foreign corn, gave a prodigious
stimulus to our domestic agriculture. A large territorial country,
that imports foreign corn, is exposed not infrequently to the
fluctuations which belong to this kind of variable dependence,
without obtaining the cheapness that ought to accompany a trade in
corn really free.

14. See this subject treated in An Inquiry into the Nature and
Progress of Rents.

15. Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent.