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

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. It would be an arduous task to enumerate all the pamphlets that have been written to prove the immense extent of poor lands at present cultivated in Britain, that must be thrown out of cultivation, in order to supply the labouring population with cheaper bread. It must be borne in mind that Britain, for the last thirty-eight years, has been on a starving system, as proved by the higher average price of grain during that period. The abolitionists being, however, a little startled at the fact, that a people in a state of starvation, as compared with Prussia or Poland, should have increased in population, in wealth, and in the ability to bear taxation, call to their aid the theory of the cultivation of poor lands. 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. Though volumes have been written to prove the evil effects of cultivating the poor soils of Britain, no one has yet, that I am aware of, devoted a single sentence to prove the fact. It is much easier to take the fact for granted, and then proceed to argue on it. The only argument I have ever heard adduced in favour of the theory, that poorer lands are cultivated in Britain than in Prussia or elsewhere, is, that the average price of grain is higher; but I never can admit the force of an argument deduced from such premises as these, that corn is high because poor land is cultivated, and that poor land is cultivated because corn is high.