not be permitted to express the hope which I am encouraged to entertain by the attention with which you have honoured me: that, long after the period of your academical education, you will recollect with satisfaction these studies of your youth; and that by fixing in some measure your principles concerning the nature, the duties, and the prospects of man, they may contribute, under the various vicissitudes of fortune that may yet await you, to fortify your virtuous resolutions, to elevate your views above the pursuits of a vulgar ambition, and to cherish in your minds those habitual sentiments of religion, of humanity, of justice, and of fortitude, which can alone render the talents and accomplishments, (to the cultivation of which so many of your early years have been already devoted,) a source of permanent happiness and honour to yourselves, a blessing to your friends, and a pledge to your country for the perpetuity of that political fabric reared by the hands and cemented with the blood of your ancestors, now, alas! standing alone amid the wreck of surrounding establishments, the last asylum and the only remaining bulwark of the liberties of Europe.18th April 1808. APPENDICES. Although I have already, I presume, sufficiently evinced that the influence of all legal regulations, with regard to the imports and exports of grain, is perfectly trifling when compared with the influence of the seasons, as well as the influence of the general state of the kingdom, I would, however, by no means have it concluded that I think them at all times and in all cases absolutely useless. "There may be occasions in which they are highly expedient. If there be an uncommon scarcity of grain, we must endeavour to procure it from abroad, or run the hazard of starving. If, on the other hand, the domestic produce be so exceedingly abundant as to sink the price greatly below what the farmer can grow it for, some foreign market must be found, or, from the discouragement thence arising to the culture, it may probably occasion future want. Bounties, too, upon importation in the former instance, and upon exportation in the latter, provided the tricks and frauds of merchants and corn-dealers are sufficiently guarded against, may not be improper. In these extreme cases, I think there can be little doubt. But the principal question is, whether, in the intermediate situation of things, legal regulations, pointing out the exact prices at which exportation and importation should each respectively take place, be absolutely necessary, or even expedient. For my own part, I am rather inclined to think that the whole might safely be left to the natural course of things, and that a free unrestrained trade would be attended with no permanent evil. "Were there no general prospect of either exportation or importation, the home consumption would be the sole object regulating the growth; the farmer would always endeavour to raise it as long as it were worth his while, and no laws could induce him to do it any longer. Whatever he finds most profitable he will turn his attention to, be it corn, hops, or cattle; and this in time will inevitably produce a general level. Variety of seasons, as better suiting the one or the other, will, indeed, occasion frequent vibrations of the balance, but all will finally tend to restore and preserve the due equilibrium. And I much question whether any of the corn laws, through the whole of the present century, have occasioned a single acre more or less to be sown, with any species of grain, than would have been had no such laws ever existed."-Dispersion of the Gloomy Apprehensions, &c., by the Rev. John Howlett, p. 37. |