the shape of rent than the quantity by which the demand of purchasers could exalt the price of produce over the cost of production, and as they narrowed the circle of purchasers, they lowered the motives of improvement, and stinted the powers of the cultivator.

For throughout the whole of the controversy on the nature of rent, people argued persistently, as though everything was to be measured by wheat. Wheat was

the staple food of the people, and therefore, every process of production was to be referred to this standard. But the staple food of the people is one thing, the staple industry of the home-producer is another. To limit the latter by the former, unless under compulsion, is prodigious folly. But this was done by the corn-laws, which prevented the farmer from seeking to supply a market for other agricultural produce, by forcing him to devote all his energies to the production of wheat. The act was only less absurd than it would be to abandon all the cultivation of grain in the south of England, in order to take up with that of vineyards.

The farmer, it is

At the present time we know better. true, grows wheat, it may be advantageously, but also it may be necessarily, as one in the rotation of crops. But he also grows other kinds of grain, and especially provides meat and dairy produce; articles in which he is naturally protected, because they cannot be imported, or cannot be easily imported from foreign countries. Now no one pretends to say that the soil of Great Britain has gone out of cultivation since the repeal of the corn-laws, or is occupied less beneficially for the landowner. On the contrary, there has been, as we know from the income-tax returns, a regular annual rise in rent, since the repeal of

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the corn-laws. The fact is, if the farmer has lost on the cultivation of wheat, he has gained on that of barley, probably on that of oats, while the price of meat is fifty per cent. higher, and butter and milk, especially in country places, are nearly twice the price they were twenty years ago. The farmer, in short, has turned that to account which free-trade in corn has silently taught him; he has allowed the American farmer and the Russian peasant to supply the people of this country with a certain quantity of the grain which they need, and has occupied himself in producing that which pays him better, and ultimately increases the margin from which rent is payable. The cheaper the artisan or other labourer can get bread, the better able is he to buy meat, for the larger overplus there is in wages above the price of the first necessaries of life, the larger means are there for buying the secondary necessaries, its comforts, and its luxuries. A densely-peopled country like England is, as I have said before, like a vast city, to which the less peopled parts of the civilised world are an agricultural country, which is glad to send its overplus of provisions in exchange for the luxuries and conveniences of a manufacturing region.

Since therefore the rent of land is all that is over and above the price at which the produce of land is sold, after the cost of production is deducted, we shall find that what measures the rent of agricultural land, equally measures the rent of business premises. A large trading house in one of the great London thoroughfares may be let at, say £2000 per annum of rent. Now some part of this sum is interest on capital expended in the building itself. Let this amount to £10,000, and, at six per cent.,

be £600 a year: the remaining £1400 is ground-rent, i. e. is a payment made for a particular site because it has certain conveniences, productive powers, or, to use an analogous term, fertilities, which another site, on which a building equally costly might be erected, would not possess. The person who rents such premises believes, and no doubt with good reason, that it is worth his while to pay this large rent, because he recovers it in the business qualities of the site. And we may be quite sure that, roughly and on an average, the superior business properties of such a site as I have described are worth just the difference between the rent of an equally costly building in a locality which has no such advantages, and the rent of a place which has them. Exactly the same rule will apply to the rent of a coal or other mine, a shooting moor, a salmon stream, or any other right of using the surface of the earth by purchase from its owner.

These facts, which explain the origin of rent and the measure of its extension, will also account for great fertility or capacity on the part of some soils not being followed by the rent which apparently should be derivable from them. For example, it is constantly the case that land which has only lately been taken into cultivation (such for example as the gentler declivities of chalk downs) will bear a rent of, say eighteen shillings an acre, while old arable land will bear no more than thirty shillings, and this while the produce of wheat on the former is not more than twelve bushels, that of the latter is twenty-eight bushels the acre. On investigation, and on all other crops being taken into account, this seeming discrepancy will always be explained by the comparative

cost of production. It will be found for instance that the cost of ploughing, dressing, and manuring the richer land is greater, that the capital employed is more to the acre, that it costs more to get the crop in, and so forth; and that we may be quite sure of the formula (supposing the rent in each case were to be equally determined by competition) being as follows:-As eighteen shillings are to thirty shillings, and as twelve bushels of wheat, &c. are to twenty-eight bushels, so is the cost of producing the smaller quantity to the cost of producing the larger.

It

Thus it comes to pass that the rent of grass or meadow land is so much higher than that of arable. costs less to cultivate it, and the margin of rent is greater. The farmer can always pay more, the less capital he needs for cultivation. This fact is equally clear in the history of rent derived from the same parcels of land. Arable rents, as I have said, have risen from forty to sixty times, natural meadow-land rents have risen from ten to twelve times only; for that which was possessed of these qualities five hundred years ago was, with some slight differences, cultivated with as little cost as it now is.

As the rent of land is that which remains over and above the cost of production, it is paid last, i. e. when all the other contributories are satisfied. Such a state of things is perhaps never historically exhibited, for as a rural population, however poor, can always be made to pay some tax, so they may be always made to pay some rent. Such a rent however is artificial, just as the rent of land would be in those parts of the United States where a dollar an acre is paid for fresh prairie, or in the Australian colonies where a pound an acre is charged for grants of public land, these regulations being accom

panied by prohibitions of squatting. The rents of the middle ages were rather taxes than rents, sums extracted from the subject peasantry rather than compensations for the use of a natural agent, the amount of which was limited and the whole appropriated. But though the satisfaction of rent comes last, the amount of rent, as my reader will anticipate, is an increasing quantity. If by some device or invention the produce of the soil could be procured at half the cost at which it is procured at present, nothing could prevent the whole difference from being (other things being equal) paid as rent, just as the product of past inventions has been and is appropriated by the landowner as soon as these inventions are generally used. Such an appropriation is inevitable if we recognise a permanent property in land, and if a right be conferred on the owner of securing all the future as well as the present value of his estate. Such a right has almost invariably been accorded, because it is justly believed that industry in developing the resources of the soil would not be exercised were the ownership imperfect or contingent, or liable to sudden determination on paying the present capital value of the usufruct. If this be the case, it will be seen that the argument is very strong for securing fixity of tenure for the occupier of the soil as well as for the owner.

My reader will now be able to anticipate the causes which will increase rent and those which will diminish it, viz. everything which diminishes or enhances the cost of production. Thus the introduction of machinery, if, as is invariably the case, it is cheaper in the gross than human or animal labour, will tend to increase rents. Of course machinery is costly; but no one would use it