When the great scarcities of 1799–1800 took place, the Board was equal to the occasion. It urged the Government to get supplies of rice from India; it preached earnestly the cultivation of waste lands and the temporary conversion of grass lands into cornfields. The last was done widely enough when the prices of corn were high. The second, except when it meant enclosure of commons, was hardly done at all; and there was a strange impression that the efforts of the Board were at bottom a political movement against ecclesiastical titles and the Established Church. The importation of rice would have been of immense immediate service; but by the time the order had reached India and the rice ships had come back to England,[481] the famine was over, the people preferred wheat, and £350,000 of bounty were thrown away.[482] Nothing shows the insularity of English commercial policy better than the remedies generally proposed in those days for curing the evils of a bad harvest. The House of Commons passed self-denying ordinances[483] and brown-bread bills, and offered a bounty on potatoes.[484] There was some talk inside the House of enforcing a minimum rate of wages, and outside of enforcing a maximum price of bread. The people were told to eat red herrings instead of bread; philanthropic soup shops were opened; distilleries and starch manufactories were threatened with prohibition. Relief from the poor rates was, however, the favourite way of cutting the knot. Better that our people should depend on each other than on the foreigner. This fear of dependence was the more pardonable then, as there were times, in the war with Napoleon, when England was more completely alone against the world than she is ever likely to be again. It was a much more culpable folly to pretend[485] that the scarcity was due to “forestalling and regrating,”[486] and that England could have provided for herself well enough, even in 1799 and 1800, but for the corn-dealers and the large farms and the enclosures and the new-fashioned husbandry. The new learning, however, went on its way.[487] The benefits of it may have gone to farmer[488] or to landlord,—the question was much debated,—but they did not go to the labourers. The same is true of the improvements in cattle-breeding introduced by Bakewell of Leicester and Chaplin of Lincoln, and encouraged by the Smithfield Club (1798), which has long outlived the Board of Agriculture. The life of the country labourers was little changed. They and their wages could not remain entirely unaffected by the growth of manufacturing towns. But custom still had the chief power over wages, and had no little influence on rents. From the reports sent from the Scotch, English, and Welsh counties to the Board of Agriculture in 1794, it does not appear that wages were at all, or rent very closely, in correspondence with the amount of the produce.[489] Rents were far from being rack rents, and wages were far from varying with the