Especially when for two or three years harvests have been bad, and corn has long been dear, every industry is impoverished, and almost every one, by becoming poorer, makes every other poorer too.
All trades are slack from diminished custom, and the consequence is a vast stagnant capital, much idle labour, and a greatly retarded production.
It takes two or three years to produce this full calamity, and the recovery from it takes two or three years also.

If corn should long be cheap, the labouring classes have much to spend on what they like besides.

The producers of those things become prosperous, and have a greater purchasing power.

They exercise it, and that creates in the class they deal with another purchasing power, and so all through society.

The whole machine of industry is stimulated to its maximum of energy, just as before much of it was slackened almost to its minimum.
A great calamity to any great industry will tend to produce the same effect, but the fortunes of the industries on which the wages of labour are expended are much more important than those of all others, because they act much more quickly upon a larger mass of purchasers.