"Observations on the Effects of the Corn Laws" is a pamphlet published by Thomas R. Malthus, Professor of Political Economy, regarding the policy guiding the rise and fall in the price of corn referred to as the "Corn Law." At the end of the Napoleonic Wars Parliament passed legislation banning the importation of foreign corn into Britain until domestic corn cost 80 shillings per quarter. The high price caused the cost of food to increase and caused distress among the working classes in the towns. It led to serious rioting in London and to the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in 1819. In this pamphlet, printed during the parliamentary discussion, Malthus tentatively supported the free-traders. He argued that given the increasing cost of growing British corn, advantages accrued from supplementing it from cheaper foreign sources.

Despite the renewed interest in the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), the original source material surrounding the repeal legislation has remained difficult to find for researchers, especially those outside Britain. This volume offers easy access to key Parliamentary documents, pamphlets, and speeches of the Anti-Corn Law League and a number of contemporary documents on the anticipated effects of repeal by Torrens, McCulloch, Porter, Pennington, and others.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.