A.D. 1776 
~=1850. 
which was 
partly due 
to the 
increased 
demand 
704 LAISSEZ FAIRE 
times of dearth, and there were bread riots in many places 
where no industrial improvements were being made. The 
average price of corn during the twenty-five years which 
terminated with the Battle of Waterloo was very high, and 
there were not a few periods which might be rightly described 
as times of famine. This state of affairs, which contributed 
so much to the distress of the transition, was to some extent 
a result of the Industrial Revolution. Apprenticeship, and 
the difficulty of finding an opening to start as a domestic 
worker had been a barrier to early marriage, but this was 
broken down; there was ample opportunity for obtaining 
houses near the factories, and the war on cottages no longer 
served to check the establishment of new households. As 
early as 1792, attention was called to the way in which the 
development of industrial employment, along with other 
causes, had given rise to a fresh demand for the means of 
subsistence’. The great increase of the cotton manufacture, 
and the rise of new towns, where the spinners and weavers 
lived, reacted on agricultural enterprise, the demand for food 
was greater than ever before?; and as active efforts had been 
1 The relation of these phenomena had been admirably stated in anticipation 
by Sir J. Steuart. Works, 1. 155. The influence of commerce and artificial wants 
in promoting the growth of population is very clearly put by Caldwell, Enquiry, 
in Debates, 747 (1766), and still earlier by William Temple, & clothier of Trow- 
bridge, in his Vindication of Commerce and the Arts (1758), pp. 6, 20, 74. He 
criticises W. Bell, whose Dissertation on Populousness (1756), p. 9, had advocated 
the development of agriculture as the best expedient for bringing about an 
increase of population; this essay, which obtained a Member's Prize at Cam- 
bridge, achieved some celebrity, and was translated into German by the Economic 
Bociety of Berne (Kleine Schriften, 1762). Temple's Vindication was published 
ander the pseudonym I. B., M.D.; see Brit. Mus. 1029. e. 9 (16), (McCulloch, 
Select Tracts on Commerce, p. xii) ; I feel confident that he was also the author of 
the anonymous tract Considerations on Taxes as they are supposed to affect the 
price of labour tn our manufactories, subsequently enlarged into an Essay on 
Trade and Commerce (1770), Brit. Mus. 1139. i. 4; the arguments of the Vindica- 
tion are reproduced, and there is a similarity in style and arrangement. This is 
confirmed by an examination of the amusing autograph MS. notes in Temple's copy 
of A View of the Internal Policy of Great Britain, 1764 (Brit. Mus. 1250. a. 44). 
Temple also wrote a refutation of part of Smith's Chronicon Rusticum, as I gather 
Irom Smith’s reply, Case of English Farmer (Brit. Mus. 104. m. 27). 
3 Governor Pownall “entered into an explanation of the actual state of the 
supply and consumption of the kingdom ; and shewed that the present difficulties 
did not arise from any scarcity; that there was as much, if not more corn grown 
than formerly; but, from the different circumstances of the country, the con- 
sumption was considerably more than the supply; and that this disproportion