centuries of English work and wages,[563] he tries to explain away the instances where rising prices of corn and an “influx of bullion” seem to have injured the condition of the labourer; and there can be little doubt he was indirectly answering an objection to Corn Laws. When depreciation of the currency, whether through American discoveries or suspensions of cash payment, has occurred, the rebound from it (he says) has made prices fall much more than wages, and so (we are to infer), when prices are kept high, wages will follow. It may be doubted if he had weighed the full consequences of such a contention in the light of his own principles of free trade. Professor Rogers[564] has had the valuable aid of old College accounts. Malthus had little besides Eden, Arthur Young, and the Reports to the Board of Agriculture; and it is doubtful if he fully understood the effects on the labourer of Henry VII.’s debasement of the currency, or could apply the analogy to the depreciation in his own day.[565] But on the whole, as years went on, he became less physiocratic. He came to acknowledge that, if a purely agricultural country might in some cases, like America, be the best possible for the labourer, it might in other cases, like Poland or Ireland, be the worst possible for him. If we hear that the labourer in one country earns in a year fifteen and in another nine quarters of wheat, we cannot be sure that the former is the better off till we know the value of other things in the country in comparison with wheat. If manufactures were very dear in comparison, then the labourer’s wages except in food would go very little way, unless in a case like America, where the quantity is so great that it makes up for the little value of corn wages. In Poland the value of corn is so low, and there is so little capital in the country, that the high corn wages mean low real wages, and the population is either stationary or very slow in its increase. The prosperity of an agricultural country, then, depends on other causes than the direction of its attention to the one industry of agriculture, and without knowing these we could not infer or predict it.[566]