Science Quote by Joseph Hume

Hume’s menace is almost clinical: break the paychecks of artisans and you don’t just hurt “the towns,” you hollow out the countryside itself. He’s aiming at the Corn Laws, the protectionist tariff regime that kept grain prices high to benefit landowners. In one sentence, he flips the landlords’ favorite story - that agriculture is the nation’s bedrock - into a dependency chain that runs the other way. Industrial wages aren’t a side effect of national prosperity; they’re the hidden engine propping up land values.

The specific intent is tactical and parliamentary. Hume isn’t pleading for compassion; he’s warning property. If you price food up and work down, you shrink the domestic market. Artisans without wages buy less bread, less meat, less everything. Demand collapses, rents follow, and the very class the Corn Laws were designed to enrich discovers it has been subsidizing its own decline.

The subtext is an argument about modern Britain’s power structure. Calling out “artisans” signals the new political fact of the 19th century: the productive classes in cities are becoming economically central and socially volatile. Starve them and you invite unrest, but Hume chooses the language of valuation rather than morality. That’s deliberate. He’s speaking to a legislature stacked with landed interests, translating social damage into an asset-price threat they can’t dismiss.

Context sharpens the edge: post-Napoleonic Britain, high bread prices, periodic depression, and a state trying to protect old wealth while the Industrial Revolution reorganizes what wealth even is. Hume’s line works because it treats protectionism not as tradition, but as a self-sabotaging experiment in scarcity.