This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1904 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV GENERAL RESULTS I Propose, in conclusion, to make a rapid survey of the principal results of the historical inquiry, and to consider very briefly what bearing they may have on the present condition of affairs. At the present time, and indeed for the last sixty years, the term corn laws has been applied so exclusively to the duties on import, that the fact is overlooked that restraints on imports were only part, and for centuries not the most important part, of the Corn Law system. Up to nearly the end of the eighteenth century, England was on the average an exporting country, and the bounty on the export of corn was 147 not actually repealed till 1814. It is true that by this time the bounty was altogether inoperative, but, in the opinion of Tooke, up to this same date the restraints on imports had also been inoperative. This narrowing of the interpretation of the Corn Laws to protective import duties has also been accompanied by a corresponding narrowing of the real interests involved in the agitation for the repeal of these duties. A wider historical survey shows that the Corn Law, even when reduced to protective import duties, was itself complex, and part of a system still more complex. This complex system of regulation of all kinds of trades and industries had begun to break up under the pressure of natural economic forces, and had been subjected to political attack and legislative modification long before any serious attempt was made to repeal the restrictions on the import of corn. Huskisson, when effecting a series of reforms in the direction of Free Trade in 1823 to 1825, declined to interfere with the Corn Laws. Peel's great budget of 1842, which was the basis of the fiscal revolution that culminated in i860, did so...