III.

THE CULTIVATION OF LAND BY OWNERS AND OCCUPIERS.

The consequence of agricultural success-The Duke of Argyll's illustration of rent-The history of progress-The errors of theory-The history of agricultural produce-The accuracy of ancient accounts-Gregory King's law of prices-English famines— Agriculture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries-The survey of Gamlingay-Common fields-Pasture-CommonsThe regular clergy and agriculture-Primogeniture-The land and stock lease-Development of new tenancies, terms of years, life, and on rack-rent.

THE development and progress of agriculture is the first and most convincing proof that a particular race can rise above barbarism. It is true that the practice of agriculture is compatible with and may be characteristic of an unprogressive stage, one in which civilization is early and strangely arrested. But such an arrested growth can almost always be explained by the presence of definite causes, which it costs the publicist little trouble to detect and expound.

1. The success of agriculture measures the numbers of any given community who, in the absence of foreign importation, can be maintained on the soil. When foreign importation is free and copious, the whole trading world must be taken as one community, and the rule will be found to apply with equal accuracy. We in England do not produce, perhaps could not produce enough food

THE CONSEQUENCE OF AGRICULTURAL SUCCESS. 47

from the land, wherewith to feed all its inhabitants, though this inability, for reasons which will be given further on, is disputable. But as it is we draw our supplies from various parts of the world, not a little of that which we import being in liquidation of liabilities which foreign nations or our own colonies have contracted with their English creditors. If by any ill-advised act we should check the imports of these countries, we should ruin them, or, what is more probable, compel them to repudiate their debts. It is infinitely more dangerous for a free trade country to reverse its policy, than it is for one which is protectionist to abandon that. To fall into a vice is mischievous, to abandon a vice is, economically, progressive.

2. The success of agriculture measures the extent to which other industries than agriculture can subsist, or generally other persons besides agriculturists can live. The husbandman, at least in the early stages of his craft, when he is not forced to occupy barren land, on which he can perhaps by unremitting toil induce fertility, can even with the rudest implements produce more than is sufficient for the wants of himself and his household. It is inevitably the case, as he is the most defenceless of all workmen, that either on pretence of defending him, or by taking ransom from him for abstaining from robbing him, he will have to pay toll to armed persons who constitute themselves his superiors. His labours, with more reason, supply the maintenance of those whose industry affords him more convenient means for carrying on his calling, or relieve him from undertaking byeemployments when the labour of the fields is over or is for a time suspended. The success of his industry is therefore of profound interest to all, especially when the home supply is the entire or principal source of maintenance to the inhabitants of any country. Even when it is not, the interest in successful agriculture should still be keen, for the agriculture of a country is the chief home market of a country, and the trade with one's own fellow countrymen is the safest and least risky trade of all. Everything therefore, be it law, practice, or custom, which discourages agriculture or checks its development, is a public nuisance, however venerable the law, practice, or custom may be. There has been, and there is, considerable discouragement put on agriculture, and

it is the duty of statesmen, without delay, to remove, or at least to mitigate, the causes of this discouragement.

3. The success of agriculture is the measure of rent. Rent is undoubtedly the payment made for the use of a natural instrument, the use of which is necessary to human society - the effectual and successful use of which is of profound interest to human society. The Duke of Argyll, a great, perhaps an overconfident eulogist of landowners, has compared the hire of agricultural land to the hire of a musical instrument. The comparison is ingenious and not inaccurate, but I do not think that the Duke saw the full force of his comparison. Perhaps if he had, he would not have quoted it. Let us admit that the hire of a piece of land is like the hire of a Straduarius violin. In the hands of most of us, certainly in my hands, the rent I would give for the violin would not be a penny a year; I could make no profitable music by it. But in the hands of Herr Joachim, the rent of such an instrument might be worth many pounds a year, for he could discourse most excellent music by it. And this is just the case with land. It needs the skill, experience, education, intelligence of the occupier. This has been till recent times, is in some parts of the United Kingdom, of the highest capacity and efficiency. I have studied the agriculture of Europe on the spot over the greater part of its western countries, that of America from the seaboard to the Rocky Mountains, and northward to the Great Lakes. I have never seen any husbandman equal to the English farmer. But I shall have occasion hereafter to dwell on this at more length and with more precision, when I handle the economic history of rent. At present I need only say that rent is the result of two forces. Ordinary economists have generally dwelt on only the first of them. The one is the natural powers of the soil, sometimes called original and indestructible, foolishly so, because one hardly can tell what are the original powers, and no one can allege what are indestructible, except it be such as certainly do not contribute to fertility. The other, and the vastly more important one, is the acquired capacity or skill of the tenant-the power, to revert to the Duke's illustration, of playing with effect on the violin. Unfortunately, the acquired capacity and skill of the tenant are very destructible, and have been destroyed.

RENT. THE HISTORY OF PROGRESS.

49

Economists tell us, inter alia, that they busy themselves with the laws which regulate or govern the production of wealth; though when they deal with details they display the grossest ignorance about the production of the most necessary and important of human products, those of agriculture. The laws which primarily govern the production of wealth are laws of nature, and by discovering them, following and using them, human industry confers utility on matter. Some are obvious and simple. No husbandman sows corn in midsummer, expecting to reap in midwinter. The earliest artisans, miners, metallurgists knew certain natural laws, attention to which was essential to their industry. But some natural laws have only been arrived at by long observation, by profound study, by cautious research. The shortening of a voyage out and home from an English port to one in Hindostan and back again, from two years to four months, is the result of an infinite study of natural lawssome gathered on the ocean itself, some in the workshop, some in the laboratory, some, and these not the least, in the mathematician's study. Wrought iron cost in money of the fourteenth century £12 a ton. Twelve is generally a fair multiple for prices of that time, taking one thing with another, when we compare them with modern experience. Why has iron fallen in price from £144 to £4, but by the discovery and adaptation of natural laws?

The production of wealth, then, is the selection and adoption of natural laws, through the agency of human intelligence, which is progressive. We cannot tell what are the limits of human intelligence and consequently of its power. We are amazed at what it has done, and cannot guess what it may do. To have predicted a century ago, that a power would convey passengers over roads at the rate of sixty miles an hour, would have seemed as absurd as the nocturnal and aerial voyage of Borak. To have predicted that the most delicate colours would be procured from coal tar, and flavours and essences from the same material, would have been deemed the talk of a Bedlamite. There are no doubt arid and unprofitable statements constantly made, such as that men will never travel as fast as light, or in organic chemistry make synthesis as easy as analysis. There is no subject on which impossibilities have been predicted with more unfortunate assurance by economists

as those on production, and especially on agricultural production and its congeners.

We, who have to read those books in which the speculative element obscures the practical side of political economy, are treated to many alarmist predictions about the margin of cultivation, the law of diminishing returns, and the exhaustion of fertility, and this constantly by people who are profoundly ignorant of the practical side of that on which they dogmatize. But no one except in a general way has ever discovered the margin of cultivation, has ever seen the law of diminishing returns in operation, or has witnessed the exhaustion of fertility. It is because they know nothing about the facts that they are so strangely and, at times, so mischievously confident. As yet we know that wheat will not grow on a granite rock, though if this rock be disintegrated it makes the most fertile of soils, and that you could not on grounds of physical space and botanical conditions grow 150 bushels of wheat to the acre, and that you can by an indefinite number of croppings of a certain kind extinguish and annul the indestructible powers of the soil, but no one ever saw these results. Unfortunately the reputation of those who talk and write nonsense, sometimes induces most mischievous fallacies of practice on the mind of those who do not see through the nonsense, and great hostility to the professors and teachers of a science which men of the world, who have to interpret the system, declare to be unpractical and intolerable verbiage.

I do not indeed purpose, in this lecture, to deal with the economical history of rent. The treatment of this most important fact, in what economists call the laws which govern the distribution of wealth, will be reserved for a subsequent occasion, for I hope that we shall be able, as I go on with these several subjects, to proceed from what I may call the general treatment of economical history to those concrete cases, in the true interpretation of which such serious consequences are involved, and such necessary appeals are made to the interposition of law. For as the laws which govern the distribution of wealth, by which an economist means the share which each person in the great industrial partnership receives, are merely or mainly of human origin, it is plainly part of the functions of the statesman to remedy any injustice which may be traced to this adventitious origin, to determine what contracts should be