Science Quote by Joseph Hume

Free trade, Hume suggests, is not a charity for the British consumer; it is a pricing machine that ratchets everyone else up to Britain. The line has the cool, lab-coat confidence of a man who wants policy to sound like physics: “abundant proof,” “always tends,” cause and effect laid out as if tariffs and harvests were mere variables in a controlled experiment. That tone matters. In the early-19th-century fight over the Corn Laws, the battlefield was not only Parliament but the public’s intuition about markets. Hume is trying to overwrite the common fear that opening ports would flood Britain with cheap grain and ruin domestic farmers.

The subtext is a defense of liberalization without conceding the anxiety it triggered. By claiming imports rise to “the price in the English market,” Hume flips the direction of contagion: British prices are the gravitational center, pulling foreign corn upward rather than being dragged down by continental cheapness. It’s a rhetorical judo move that makes free trade seem safe for landowners and farmers while still sounding modern and “scientific.”

Context sharpens the intent. Britain’s grain prices were propped up by protection; repeal advocates needed to argue that domestic agriculture wouldn’t collapse and that markets would stabilize rather than implode. Hume’s phrasing also hints at a national self-image: England as the benchmark market, setting the terms for Europe, not begging it for bargains. The sentence performs confidence in Britain’s economic dominance while smuggling in a political promise: open the ports, and the country keeps its center of gravity.