صفحة 548 من 2651

The high price of corn during these ten or twelve years past,

indeed, has occasioned a suspicion that the real value of silver

still continues to fall in the European market. This high price

of corn, however, seems evidently to have been the effect of the

extraordinary unfavourableness of the seasons, and ought,

therefore, to be regarded, not as a permanent, but as a

transitory and occasional event. The seasons, for these ten or

twelve years past, have been unfavourable through the greater

part of Europe; and the disorders of Poland have very much

increased the scarcity in all those countries, which, in dear

years, used to be supplied from that market. So long a course of

bad seasons, though not a very common event, is by no means a

singular one; and whoever has inquired much into the history of

the prices of corn in former times, will be at no loss to

recollect several other examples of the same kind.