See C. H. M'Master, _History of the Settlement of Steuben County_ (Bath, N.Y., 1853).
CORN LAWS. In England, legislation on corn was early applied both to home and foreign trade in this essential produce. Roads were so bad, and the chain of home trade so feeble, that there was often scarcity of grain in one part, and plenty in another part of the same kingdom. Export by sea or river to some foreign market was in many cases more easy than the carriage of corn from one market to another within the country. The frequency of local dearths, and the diversity and fluctuation of prices, were thus extreme. It was out of this general situation that the first corn laws arose, and they appear to have been wholly directed towards lowering the price of corn. Exportation was prohibited, and home merchandise in grain was in no repute or toleration. As long as the rent of land, including the extensive domains of the crown, was paid in kind, the sovereign, the barons and other landholders had little interest in the price of corn different from that of other classes of people, the only demand for corn being for consumption and not for resale or export. But as rents of land came to be paid in money, the interest of the farmer to be distinguished by a remove from that of the landowner, the difference between town and country to be developed, and the business of society to be more complex, the ruling powers of the state were likely to be actuated by other views; and hence the force which corn legislation afterward assumed in favour of what was deemed the agricultural interest. But during four centuries after the Conquest the corn law of England simply was that export of corn was prohibited, save in years of extreme plenty under forms of state licence, and that producers carried their surplus grain into the nearest market town, and sold it there for what it would bring among those who wanted it to consume; and the same rule prevailed in the principal countries of the continent of Europe. This policy, though, as one may argue from its long continuance, probably not felt to be acutely oppressive, was of no avail in removing the evils against which it was directed. On the contrary it prolonged and aggravated them. The prohibition of export discouraged agricultural improvement, and in so much diminished the security and liberality even of domestic supply; while the intolerance of any home dealing or merchandise in corn prevented the growth of a commercial and financial interest strong enough to improve the means of transport by which the plenty of one part of the same country could have come to the aid of the scarcity in another.