THE AGRICULTURAL INTEREST AND THE CORN LAWS 723 
at the time when steam was superseding water-power. In AD Js 
the first days of the factory industry, there were many ’ 
villages situated on a stream with sufficient force to drive a 
single mill, and village factories, as we may call them, 
flourished for some time in many places. When, however, 
improved machinery was introduced, they were no longer 
remunerative and had to be closed’. Neither agriculture nor 
manufacture offered good employment in rural districts, and 
village life in all its aspects seemed to present a succession 
of pictures of misery and decay”. 
263. The increasing distress in the country, at a time 
when so much was being done to foster the landed interest, 
was a standing puzzle to the men of the time. The matter The Corn 
becomes easily explicable, however, when we bear in mind j4ze of 
certain conditions of agricultural production, which were very 
imperfectly understood at the beginning of last century. 
We may review the policy which had been pursued for a 
century or more in regard to corn. 
The Act of 1689, which allowed a bounty on exportation was 2 
. cessful in 
when the price of wheat fell below 48s. a quarter, was, by a St 
general consensus of opinion, successful, both in maintaining ohject J or 
prices at a steady level, and in giving a stimulus to English veers: 
agriculture, during the first half of the eighteenth century? 
In some succeeding years, however, the supply fell short, and 
it became necessary to introduce occasional measures both 
for suspending exportation and encouraging the import of 
grain. In 1772, Governor Pownall, while introducing a bill 
for the purpose of giving temporary relief, proposed a deries 
1 One such mill, originally a paper mill (Nash, Worcestershire, 1782, mm. 232) 
and subsequently a silk mill, existed at Overbury in Worcestershire. The pro- 
prietors got the work done almost entirely by apprentices, and their apprentices 
who had served their time and could obtain no employment were a serious evil. 
2 Compare the description of the rural population in Wakefield's Swing un- 
masked, 9, and England and America, 1. 44, also the conditions of the rural 
population as described, from the Home Office papers, in Hammond. The Village 
Labourer, 240—324. 
2 The Corn Bounty Act of 1689 had apparently served its purpose on the 
whole, for a considerable period (Thaer, Beytrdge, mm. 149—162). The measure had 
been framed ‘“so as to prevent grain from being at any time either so dear that 
the poor cannot subsist, or so cheap that the farmer cannot live by growing of it.” 
C. Smith, Considerations on the Importation and Exportation of Corn (1759), 
p. 72. Compare also Naudé, Getreidehandelspolitik. 117, and p. 711 n. 1, above. 
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