Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 423, January 1851
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
"The Free-traders had boasted much of their system as having
increased the amount of our exports; and he (Mr Young) had
been continually trying for a long period to get from them
the names of the countries to which those increased imports
went. At length he had the fact; and the result would be most
startling as applied to the arguments and predictions of
that party before the corn law was repealed. The countries
he would take were Russia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Prussia,
Germany, Holland, Belgium, and France; and he found that in
the year 1845 the quantity of corn imported from all these
countries, comprising, as they did, the whole of northern and
central Europe, amounted to 1,741,730 quarters, whilst the
declared value of British and Irish manufactures exported
to those countries was L.17,504,417. But last year the corn
imported from those countries had increased in quantity to
6,857,530 quarters, whilst our exports to them had decreased
to L.15,274,639. These figures showed that from the whole of
northern and central Europe we took last year no less than
5,115,800 quarters of corn more than in 1845, and that there
was a decrease in the value of our exports of L.2,229,778.
Again, last year the declared value of our _gross_ exports
amounted to L.63,596,025, but in 1845 it reached the sum of
L.60,111,082; so that in the course of these four years the
increase was only L.3,484,943. He found also that our exports
in 1830 were L.35,842,623, and in 1835, L.47,372,270, being an
increase on the five years of L.11,529,647, or 32 2-10ths per
cent. That was an increase under the operation of protection.
In 1840 the exports amounted to L.51,406,430, or an increase
upon 1835 of L.4,634,160, or 8 5-10ths per cent. In 1845 they
were L.60,111,082--an increase on 1840 of L.8,704,652, or
16 9-10ths per cent. In 1849, L.63,596,025, an increase on
1845 of L.3,484,943; and in the present year, supposing the
increase continued in the same ratio, he calculated that that
increase would on the year 1845 be about L.4,350,000, or 7
2-10ths per cent. Would Free-traders boast of their exports
after that? They talked upon this question as if the country
had, under the system of protection, been in a perfectly dead
and stagnant condition, and that the agriculturists were like
the clods of the earth, and less capable of improvement. Why,
it was under protection that our ships were employed to go to
the island of Ichaboe, from which guano was first imported into
this country; and it was under protection that that island
had disappeared from the face of the ocean, and every cwt. of
its guano had been brought here and spread upon the soil. He
rejoiced and exulted in the march of science as much as any
man; but it was an arrogant and an unfounded assumption on
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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