Corn Laws, Poor Laws, the Wages Fund and Emigration
Senior's publications in the 1820s reveal the steady development of the intellectual ingredients of his later approach to economic and social policy. His first publication was a review of the first Report of the Select Committee on Agricultural Distress dated 14 June 1821.
The article was published in the Quarterly Review (Senior 1821). The curtailment of imports during the Napoleonic Wars had led to a huge extension of tillage on increasingly less productive land with low yielding crops. There was widespread concern amongst landowners who had invested in these lands that with the cessation of hostilities they may have to compete with more bountiful harvests from overseas. As a result of very good Irish harvests in 1819 and 1820, prices dropped significantly and some farmers began to complain that their activities were no longer remunerative. Senior rejected Ricardo's premise that agriculture was taxed more highly than manufacturing and he was against permanent protection for the former. However, he was in favour of the introduction of a twelve-year period during which taxes would be gradually reduced thereby providing opportunities for capital to be withdrawn from the least productive land (see ibid.: 496-497). Senior also rejected Ricardo's claim that increases in the price of corn would equal the whole amount of the tax. He argued that the immediate effect of the tax would be to raise the corn price but claimed that its ultimate effect would be to diminish the consumption and production of raw produce leaving the price unaffected (Senior 1836: 122-123). Senior also disagreed with Ricardo's view that a rise in the corn price would mean that wages would inevitably rise. He argued that the wages of labour are determined by supply and demand and that the demand for labour would be reduced under the circumstances and it would be unlikely that wages would rise (see Levy 1970: 223).In 1828, Senior, Whately and others established a new quarterly journal entitled The London Review, under the editorship of the Reverend Blanco White. Senior wrote an early article for the journal entitled “On the Corn Laws and the Poor Laws” (Senior 1828b; see also Levy 1970: 229-234).[32] In this article, Senior argued that with diminishing returns and an increasing population, labourers may have to resort to food of an inferior quality and ultimately to potatoes which support six times as many people per acre as corn. However, he argued that, for the present, the Poor Laws would keep that disaster at bay. While the Corn Laws continued, any alteration in the Poor Laws would be an injustice: ‘To prohibit the poor man from purchasing his food at the cheapest market, and at the same time to take from him the subsistence to which he is by law entitled would excite, and would deserve to excite, an insurrection' (Senior in Levy 1970: 232).
He went on to argue that while the Poor Laws were useful in preventing the worst consequences of the Corn Laws, they did this at the high cost of weakening, and often destroying, ‘the industry, the providence, the self-respect and the social affections of the labourer' (ibid.: 233). In addition, there are burdens on the farmers who have to support first, the aged and the infirm, second, the unemployed, and third, the making up of wages of those who are employed but are on wages insufficient for subsistence. Referring to the last group and using strong language, Senior argues that the ‘evil began' (ibid.) when relief was given to the able-bodied. He also made the point that in addition to the Poor Laws acting as a brake on the consequences of the Corn Laws, they had often been suspended and that the importation of cattle and sheep which provided wool, hides, butter, cheese and so on had also assisted in delaying the impact of the laws. Notwithstanding this, Senior was pessimistic about the long run if the Corn Laws were not repealed.
The possibility of a large population supported by the cheapest food available was ‘perhaps the worst calamity to which a civilized community can be exposed' (ibid.: 232).In the summer of 1830, there were widespread revolts in the southern counties of England, with the burning of corn ricks and mills and the destruction of machinery. Senior published Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages with a preface which examined the riots. He put the cause of these disturbances down to the Poor Laws which had changed the relationship between the labourer and his employer from an open bargain in which the labourer knows what his services are worth to one where the labourer is paid not according to his value but his wants. He then ceases to be a freeman and acquires the ‘indolence, the improvidence, the rapacity, and the malignity but not the subordination of the slave' (Senior 1830: x-xi). Senior went on to analyse the riots in terms of the wages fund doctrine. The Poor Laws had encouraged idleness and inefficiency which reduced the wages fund; if the workers destroyed the corn ricks, they destroyed the fund for future wages. If they destroyed machinery, they destroyed the means by which their work is made more productive and which would therefore increase the wages fund. He argued that this was a short-run problem which could not be solved by recourse to the argument for population restraint for this would take too long. As such, emigration must be encouraged. This would be used in order to remove those whose labour had ceased to be profitable towards a country that will afford room for their exertions. Senior cites the case of the hand-loom weavers—a topic to which he returned at length later (ibid.: xv-xvi).
In January 1831, Senior co-authored a pamphlet with the title Remarks on Emigration, With a Draft of a Bill (Senior et al. 1831). The subject was assisted emigration and the draft was of a Bill which Lord Howick was to introduce in Parliament in the same year. Senior wrote the pamphlet with Robert Wilmot- Horton and James Stephen, although it was published anonymously.
It proposed a change in the law to allow parishes to support emigration as a means of reducing suffering and the Treasury would make loans to parishes which could be paid back later. Unusually, should the emigrant return there would be no requirement to pay back the passage but there would be a requirement to renounce all further claims on the parish for support. The cost of maintaining a family as paupers was estimated to be about £25 per annum, while the cost of transporting the family to, say, Canada would be about £70 or two to three years of parish support. Howick's Bill was defeated but Senior was not put off. In the Poor Law Amendment Bill, which he helped to draft, he inserted a clause on emigration which, as he wrote to Horton in 1836, ‘contained the essence' of the Bill which they had developed five years before (Senior quoted in Winch 1965: 67).These early papers set up what was to come in the next quarter of a century.
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