Science Quote by Joseph Hume

Hume’s sentence is a velvet-gloved ultimatum: if farmers are truly carrying “peculiar burdens,” the state must either remove those burdens or pay them back through protection. It’s a bargain framed as fairness, but it’s also a trap for anyone defending tariffs on sentimental grounds. By making relief conditional on demonstrable, specific costs, Hume pushes agriculture out of the realm of national romance and into the ledger book. Prove the burden, then we’ll talk. Can’t prove it? Then “fair and just protection” starts to look like a subsidy in costume.

The phrasing does quiet political work. “Willing to admit” signals skepticism; he’s granting the premise provisionally, not conceding it. “Equivalent” is the key word: protection is not a birthright or a patriotic duty, it’s compensation. That’s a sharp reframing in early-19th-century Britain, when the Corn Laws and their surrounding rhetoric cast landowners and farmers as the backbone of the nation. Hume, a radical reformer aligned with fiscal restraint, is insisting that policy justify itself in measurable terms rather than inherited status.

The subtext is aimed as much at landlords as at farmers: if the complaint is real, target the burden directly instead of laundering privilege through the price of bread. Protection, in this logic, is acceptable only as a last resort - and only when it can be shown to match an actual, unusual disadvantage, not merely preserve a class settlement.