The same may be said of all the pasture districts of Great Britain, compared with the surrounding corn countries. If they could only obtain the superfluities of their neighbours, and were entitled to no share of the produce when it was scarce, they could not certainly devote themselves with any degree of safety to their present occupations. There is, on this account, a grand difference between the freedom of the home trade in corn, and the freedom of the foreign trade. A government of tolerable vigour can make the home trade in corn really free. It can secure to the pasture districts, or the towns that must be fed from a distance, their share of the general produce, whether plentiful or scarce. It can set them quite at rest about the power of exchanging the peculiar products of their own labour for the other products which are necessary to them, and can dispense, therefore, to all its subjects, the inestimable advantages of an unrestricted intercourse. But it is not in the power of any single nation to secure the freedom of the foreign trade in corn. To accomplish this, the concurrence of many others is necessary; and this concurrence, the fears and jealousies so universally prevalent about the means of subsistence, almost invariably prevent. There is hardly a nation in Europe which does not occasionally exercise the power of stopping entirely, or heavily taxing, its exports of grain, if prohibitions do not form part of its general code of laws. The question then before us is evidently a special, not a general one. It is not a question between the advantages of a free trade, and a system of restrictions; but between a specific system of restrictions formed by ourselves for the purpose of rendering us, in average years, nearly independent of foreign supplies, and the specific system of restricted importations, which alone it is in our power to obtain under the existing laws of France, and in the actual state of the other countries of the continent.(8*) In looking, in the first place, at the resources of the country, with a view to an independent supply for an increasing population; and comparing subsequently the advantages of the two systems abovementioned, without overlooking their disadvantages, I have fully made up my mind as to the side on which the balance lies; and am decidedly of opinion, that a system of restrictions so calculated as to keep us, in average years, nearly independent of foreign supplies of corn, will more effectually conduce to the wealth and prosperity of the country, and of by far the greatest mass of the inhabitants, than the opening of our ports for the free admission of foreign corn, in the actual state of Europe.