With these reservations, which can only employ your attention for a short time, at most a few months, your lordship will have leisure to consider the necessary measures to be taken for increasing the strength, improving the revenue, reducing the debt, husbanding the resources, and promoting the general prosperity of the empire, during that peaceable repose so nearly approaching, and which, I trust, will be of such long endurance.

Amongst these the encouragement of agriculture will be a main and leading object; for, though I do not go so far as to agree either with those, who look upon the produce of the farm as all in all, and despise commerce; or on the other hand with those, who would sacrifice the landed to the mercantile interest; because I am well convinced that the welfare of both is best supported, and the public prosperity most substantially promoted, by the reciprocal assistance received by each of them from the other-yet I am perfectly prepared to assert that an improving state of agriculture ought to be a primary object with every wise statesman, as leading to an increased population and augmented public strength both political and financial; and as that source of advantage and profit which is most permanently independent of external chance or control, by. which the most lucrative branch of foreign trade may, at any time be cut off in a moment.

I concur, therefore completely, my lord, with your right honorable friend, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, in supporting the resolution for unlimited export in the corn trade; increased demand being the surest means of creating increase of produce, wherever such increase is producible at will, as it is in the case of corn; though quite the contrary with respect to bullion, where it is out of our power to open a single additional mine of silver, though we may plough up a thousand more fields for wheat.

I.

But with the consideration of quantity, the question of quality is also a mainly preponderating point in the culture of corn; the production of the greatest proportion of nutritive farina, with the smallest quantity of husk, and from the most limited extent of land, being evidently of equal benefit, to the grower, the consumer, and the public. I enter fully, therefore, into the recommendation of the Committee of the House of Lords in 1800 to the Committee of Privy Council, for considering the propriety of selling corn by a combination of weight and measure. have not a shadow of doubt on that head myself; weight is the only true standard of the quality of corn; the hea, viest wheat in the smallest compass will always yield the greatest proportion, of nutritive product; and the millers are so well aware of this, that in the Staffordshire markets, (to which I have been most accustomed,) they always sti-. pulate for a nominal measure to be made up to a certain› specified weight; generally (but not invariably) the Staf-. fordshire bag of three strikes, of nine Winchester gallons each, to weigh 210lbs. avoirdupoise, or 70lbs. per strike. Thereby evidently making it the interest of the farmer to. grow the heaviest and finest corn; which can only be done by keeping his land in high condition; beggarly land always producing lean half-starved grain. And in doing this they are also insensibly contributing to a great national benefit; as all judges of agriculture know that of two tenants farming an equal quantity of similar land, and applying only the manure raised on the farm, the one who sows only three tenths with wheat or on an average of seasons, will grow as much bread corn in quantity, (and of a very superior quality,) as the other who sows five or six tenths; with the important addition of two or three tenths more of his farm in grass land, in high condition for meadow or pasture.

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The sale of corn by weight is, therefore, I think highly necessary to be enforced by law; and in order to comply as far as possible with the established customs and prejudices of the growers and dealers in that article, a combination of weight and measure, (in which, however, the former is to be the legal and preponderating standard,) will prohably be found most efficient and practicable. The vast variety of both measures and weights which have acquired a sort of local usurpation over those established by the statutes, demand, as a primary step, the banishment of all such irregularities, and the establishment of one uniform weight and one measure; capable not only of almost infinite division or accumulation, each in itself, but also corresponding with the other in its several proportions; simplified at the same time, as much as the practical necessity of division will allow. I have given much time, and no inconsiderable labor of thought to this desideratum; and the result of my inquiries is exemplified in the subjoined tables; the communication of which cannot, probably, be submitted to your lordship at a more appropriate time than the present, when the two questions of corn, and of weight and measure, are both likely to engage the attention of the legislature during the existing session.

In order to evince the superior simplicity and general usefulness of these tables, it is necessary first to lay before you a sketch of the different proportions which have, at divers times, been authorised by the several acts of the legislature, as well as of those given by the principal writers on this subject; and of the improprieties in the existing weights and measures as at present established by law, and the irregular deviations from them, which have obtained a local, though illegal, kind of prescription in the provincial markets. And, secondly, on these data to form a series of calculations, from which may be established, as a general

deduction, the superior utility of the weights and measures proposed.

In the first place, then, the 27th chapter of Magna Charta, declares that the weights all over England are to be the same; but (in my opinion very unnecessarily,) gives for different sorts of commodities, two different sorts of weights, troy and avoirdupoise. The pound troy consisting of 12 ounces; each ounce of 20 pennyweights; and each pennyweight of 32 grains of wheat gathered in the middle of the ear, and well dried. This weight, established by the 51st Henry III. was confirmed by the 31st Edward I. and 12th Henry VII. It is said that this pound had obtained general usage from the Conquest; and again it is said that Henry VII. altered the old English weight, and introduced a pound troy, weighing three-quarters of an ounce more than the Saxon pound; and the 18th Henry VIII, abolished the Saxon pound, establishing that of Troy; which as before mentioned, exceeded it by three-quarters of an ounce. The pennyweight has since been divided into twenty-four equal parts, called grains, and therefore weighing 1 grain of wheat each. Dr. Hutton, however, estimates the grain troy, at one and a half of wheat. The pound avoirdupoise, which from its more general utility, has every day crept into greater use, is computed by Dr. Hutton to contain 6999 grains troy; by Ferguson (in his Lectures on Mechanics) 7000 ditto; and by the academies of London and Paris, 7004 ditto. Of these different, but not greatly varying, computations, I have thought it best to take the average. There is much confusion in these accounts; and I do not know any writer who can clear them up; neither is it of any particular consequence; it is sufficient for our purpose to know the present establishments and their errors. The first statute that appears to legalise avoirdupoise, is 24th Henry VIII,

and therein it is only directed to be used for weighing butchers' meat in the market; when it came into private use is not known.

In dry measure, the following inconsistencies take place. The brass bushel of Henry VII. found in the Exchequer in 1688, contained 2145 cubic inches; and it being known by experience, that 1728 cubic inches of wheat weigh 58,7% pounds troy, the above bushel will, therefore, contain 72 pounds troy of wheat; or 9 gallons weighing 8 pounds, and measuring 238 cubic inches each. But according to Greaves, in his origin of weights and measures, this sanie bushel, when filled with common spring water, and measured before the House of Commons in 1696, was found to contain 2145 cubic inches, and the water being weighed was equal to 1131 ounces and 14 pennyweights, or 94 pounds, three ounces and 14 pennyweights troy. The Winchester gallon measuring 272 cubic inches, is to contain 9 pounds, 13 ounces avoirdupoise. But the Winchester bushel legalised in 1697, is to measure 181⁄2 inches in diameter, and 8 inches in depth, and therefore contains 2150% cubic inches; and its corresponding gallon should be 268 inches. The standard wine gallon is computed at 231 cubic inches, and to contain 8 pounds avoirdupoise o water; but it was found by actual admeasurement, before the Lord Mayor and Commissioners of Excise in 1688, to contain only 224 cubic inches. Were I, indeed, to insert the almost numberless variations I have met with in different authors, it would swell my letter to a pamphlet, or rather to a volume.

I shall now, therefore, proceed to direct your attention to the inconsistencies in our present confused system of weights and measures, and then to calculate the proportions between them and the proposed tables. It is hardly necessary to point out the evident inutility of a separate weight