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Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 100, 22 January 1936, Page 7

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Warning From the Past

' “Casting back for 100 years, one realises the cause of the English and Scottish migration to the colonies of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia,” writes Mr. W. Barton. “I enclose an extract from the London “Times” of 100 years ago. I ask Mr. Nash to make a mental note of the last paragraph” The paragraph from “The _Times” of Saturday, November 28, 1835, reads as follows: — “We are deluged with correspondence from a variety of quarters on this subject of agricultural distress, and the doctrines are as numerous as the writers, agreeing only in a single point—namely, that prices are ruinously depressed. ... If the farm produce has of late years not fetched remunerating prices, how comes it (hat, according to Lord Fitzwilliam, a greater breadth of soil has during that period of constantly accumulating complaint been brought under the plough than formerly? ... If the price of grain be distressingly low to the British agriculturist for a series of seasons, during which there has been no importation;, the solution is the same as if the price of cotton goods were too low. Thbre has been in the one case too much cotton cloth, in the other too much wheat, manufactured. . . . For our parts, we have thought from the beginning that the most calamitous event which ever befel the landed Interest of Great Britain was that act for affixing artificial prices to the produce of the soil, and distorting by a forcible intrusion of the Legislature the natural relations of landlord, occupier and consumer.”