"Might reduce the price of raw produce to the cost of production?" Is it ever for any length of time either above or below this price? Does not Mr. Malthus himself, state it never to be so? "I hope," he says, "to be excused for dwelling a little, and presenting to the reader in various forms the doctrine, that corn, in reference to the quantity _actually produced_, is sold at its necessary price like manufactures, because I consider it as a truth of the highest importance, which has been overlooked by the economists, by Adam Smith, and all those writers, who have represented raw produce as selling always at a monopoly price." "Every extensive country may thus be considered as possessing a gradation of machines for the production of corn and raw materials, including in this gradation not only all the various qualities of poor land, of which every territory has generally an abundance, but the inferior machinery which may be said to be employed when good land is further and further forced for additional produce. As the price of raw produce continues to rise, these inferior machines are successively called into action; and as the price of raw produce continues to fall, they are successively thrown out of action. The illustration here used serves to shew at once the _necessity of the actual price of corn to the actual produce_, and the different effect which would attend a great reduction in the price of any particular manufacture, and a great reduction in the price of raw produce."[54]