Volume V Part 7 (2/2)
The meadow-gra.s.s yielded but a middling crop, and neither of the sown or natural gra.s.s was there in any farmer's possession any remainder from the year worth taking into account. In most places there was none at all.
Oats with me were not in a quant.i.ty more considerable than in commonly good seasons; but I have never known them heavier than they were in other places. The oat was not only an heavy, but an uncommonly abundant crop.
My ground under pease did not exceed an acre or thereabouts, but the crop was great indeed. I believe it is throughout the country exuberant.
It is, however, to be remarked, as generally of all the grains, so particularly of the pease, that there was not the smallest quant.i.ty in reserve.
The demand of the year must depend solely on its own produce; and the price of the spring corn is not to be expected to fall very soon, or at any time very low.
Uxbridge is a great corn market. As I came through that town, I found that at the last market-day barley was at forty s.h.i.+llings a quarter.
Oats there were literally none; and the inn-keeper was obliged to send for them to London. I forgot to ask about pease. Potatoes were 5_s_. the bushel.
In the debate on this subject in the House, I am told that a leading member of great ability, _little conversant in these matters_, observed, that the general uniform dearness of butcher's meat, b.u.t.ter, and cheese could not be owing to a defective produce of wheat; and on this ground insinuated a suspicion of some unfair practice on the subject, that called for inquiry.
Unquestionably, the mere deficiency of wheat could not cause the dearness of the other articles, which extends not only to the provisions he mentioned, but to every other without exception.
The cause is, indeed, so very plain and obvious that the wonder is the other way. When a properly directed inquiry is made, the gentlemen who are amazed at the price of these commodities will find, that, when hay is at six pound a load, as they must know it is, herbage, and for more than one year, must be scanty; and they will conclude, that, if gra.s.s be scarce, beef, veal, mutton, b.u.t.ter, milk, and cheese _must_ be dear.
But to take up the matter somewhat more in detail.--If the wheat harvest in 1794, excellent in quality, was defective in quant.i.ty, the barley harvest was in quality ordinary enough, and in quant.i.ty deficient. This was soon felt in the price of malt.
Another article of produce (beans) was not at all plentiful. The crop of pease was wholly destroyed, so that several farmers pretty early gave up all hopes on that head, and cut the green haulm as fodder for the cattle, then peris.h.i.+ng for want of food in that dry and burning summer.
I myself came off better than most: I had about the fourth of a crop of pease.
It will be recollected, that, in a manner, all the bacon and pork consumed in this country (the far largest consumption of meat out of towns) is, when growing, fed on gra.s.s, and on whey or skimmed milk,--and when fatting, partly on the latter. This is the case in the dairy countries, all of them great breeders and feeders of swine; but for the much greater part, and in all the corn countries, they are fattened on beans, barley-meal, and pease. When the food of the animal is scarce, his flesh must be dear. This, one would suppose, would require no great penetration to discover.
This failure of so very large a supply of flesh in one species naturally throws the whole demand of the consumer on the diminished supply of all kinds of flesh, and, indeed, on all the matters of human sustenance.
Nor, in my opinion, are we to expect a greater cheapness in that article for this year, even though corn should grow cheaper, as it is to be hoped it will. The store swine, from the failure of subsistence last year, are now at an extravagant price. Pigs, at our fairs, have sold lately for fifty s.h.i.+llings, which two years ago would not have brought more than twenty.
As to sheep, none, I thought, were strangers to the general failure of the article of turnips last year: the early having been burned, as they came up, by the great drought and heat; the late, and those of the early which had escaped, were destroyed by the chilling frosts of the winter and the wet and severe weather of the spring. In many places a full fourth of the sheep or the lambs were lost; what remained of the lambs were poor and ill fed, the ewes having had no milk. The calves came late, and they were generally an article the want of which was as much to be dreaded as any other. So that article of food, formerly so abundant in the early part of the summer, particularly in London, and which in a great part supplied the place of mutton for near two months, did little less than totally fail.
All the productions of the earth link in with each other. All the sources of plenty, in all and every article, were dried or frozen up.
The scarcity was not, as gentlemen seem to suppose, in wheat only.
Another cause, and that not of inconsiderable operation, tended to produce a scarcity in flesh provision. It is one that on many accounts cannot be too much regretted, and the rather, as it was the sole _cause_ of a scarcity in that article which arose from the proceedings of men themselves: I mean the stop put to the distillery.
The hogs (and that would be sufficient) which were fed with the waste wash of that produce did not demand the fourth part of the corn used by farmers in fattening them. The spirit was nearly so much clear gain to the nation. It is an odd way of making flesh cheap, to stop or check the distillery.
The distillery in itself produces an immense article of trade almost all over the world,--to Africa, to North America, and to various parts of Europe. It is of great use, next to food itself, to our fisheries and to our whole navigation. A great part of the distillery was carried on by damaged corn, unfit for bread, and by barley and malt of the lowest quality. These things could not be more unexceptionably employed. The domestic consumption of spirits produced, without complaints, a very great revenue, applicable, if we pleased, in bounties, to the bringing corn from other places, far beyond the value of that consumed in making it, or to the encouragement of its increased production at home.
As to what is said, in a physical and moral view, against the home consumption of spirits, experience has long since taught me very little to respect the declamations on that subject. Whether the thunder of the laws or the thunder of eloquence ”is hurled on _gin_” always I am thunder-proof. The alembic, in my mind, has furnished to the world a far greater benefit and blessing than if the _opus maximum_ had been really found by chemistry, and, like Midas, we could turn everything into gold.
Undoubtedly there may be a dangerous abuse in the excess of spirits; and at one time I am ready to believe the abuse was great. When spirits are cheap, the business of drunkenness is achieved with little time or labor; but that evil I consider to be wholly done away. Observation for the last forty years, and very particularly for the last thirty, has furnished me with ten instances of drunkenness from other causes for one from this. Ardent spirit is a great medicine, often to remove distempers, much more frequently to prevent them, or to chase them away in their beginnings. It is not nutritive in _any great_ degree. But if not food, it greatly alleviates the want of it. It invigorates the stomach for the digestion of poor, meagre diet, not easily alliable to the human const.i.tution. Wine the poor cannot touch. Beer, as applied to many occasions, (as among seamen and fishermen, for instance,) will by no means do the business. Let me add, what wits inspired with champagne and claret will turn into ridicule,--it is a medicine for the mind.
Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times and in all countries called in some physical aid to their moral consolations,--wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.
I consider, therefore, the stopping of the distillery, economically, financially, commercially, medicinally, and in some degree morally too, as a measure rather well meant than well considered. It is too precious a sacrifice to prejudice.
Gentlemen well know whether there be a scarcity of partridges, and whether that be an effect of h.o.a.rding and combination. All the tame race of birds live and die as the wild do.
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