84 CO-OPERATION OF NATURAL AGENTS WITH HUMAN LABOUR.

Bastiat was not extravagant when, announcing it in 1850, thirteen years after Carey, he declared, "Such is the great, admirable, consoling, and necessary law of capital. To demonstrate it, is, as it appears to me, to overwhelm with discredit the declamations, with which our ears have so long been assailed, against the avidity and tyranny of the most potent instrument of civilization and equalization, that human faculties ever produced."

To exhibit it in its universality, the indispensable test of a genuine law, we must show that it governs capital in land. This will be more conveniently done in treating of Rent; after which we shall present historic and statistical evidence, that the course of things in the actual going-on of the world's business has been such as the law requires, and that the supposititious cases we have imagined are fair illustrations of a principle, which works unremittingly, producing its effects by slow and imperceptible gradations. Nature never acts per saltum; though to elucidate her laws we are obliged, for the sake of contrast, to place things and events in juxtaposition, that are separated by wide tracts of space and time, and thus to present a long series of effects in the aspect of a single and rapid change.

CHAPTER IV.

RENT.

IN the United States there are rarely more than two classes of persons occupied in the cultivation of the earth, the proprietors and those to whom they pay wages. The interest of the proprietors in the soil is absolute. They own it in fee simple. The term "fee" comes from the feudal law, and imports that the land is held of a superior lord, to whom the estate, on the happening of certain contingencies, as the failure of heirs, would revert. Except as affording a basis for the right of eminent domain, residing in the State, and in virtue of which it appropriates-according to the feudal theory, resumes—land, when required for public purposes, the word "fee" has no practical signification in most of the States of our Confederacy. Land is allodial.

In England there are three classes concerned in the partition of the products of the soil-the landlords, the farmers, who rent of them and who furnish the capital expended in cultivation, and the labourers whom these employ. The English writers, therefore, discourse of the rent of the landlord, the profits of the farmer or capitalist, and the wages of the labourer. The separation of the proprietors and the tenants into distinct classes, undoubtedly suggested the notion, that the laws governing the remuneration received by them are different, and that there is some quality in Rent, by which it can be discriminated from other profits. It thus comes that Rent forms a distinct and prominent title in the treatises of the English Economists. They have been followed in this particular by Economists of the Continent, even where the usage upon which the English practice is founded has never prevailed. This is because the rent of land is the index of its value. In England, indeed, land is habitually valued in terms of its rent. It is said to be worth so many years' purchase, and is bought and sold at prices estimated in that way. To what circumstances is it that it owes its value?—and to

what circumstances does land owe its power to produce an income or rent to its owner? are obviously the same question. We propose to inquire whether it is any original quality, or is due to subsequent

causes.

Land in the Valley of the Connecticut sells for two hundred dollars the acre. Land of equal, if not superior fertility, and with advantages in point of climate, on the banks of the Genesee, can be bought for fifty dollars per acre. Land, in every respect equal in its native qualities to either, but lying in Wisconsin, can be bought for $1 25 per acre. The same laws and institutions prevail in the three localities. The settlers of the Genesee country were emigrants from Massachusetts and Connecticut. The settlers of Wisconsin were colonists from Western New York. If we proceed farther west, land can be had without asking, by any man who chooses to squat upon it. It is without value. Two hundred and thirty years ago the lands on the Connecticut-a little more than fifty years ago the lands on the Genesee, were in the same situation. What is it that has infused value into them?

A great share of the value can be traced to labour expended directly upon the land. It has been cleared of the trees which covered it—a slow and toilsome process when it was undertaken, and an expensive one, because the timber, everywhere abundant and cumbrous to transport, would bring no price. The stumps have been rooted out; ditches dug to drain it; fences, barns, and stables built; lanes made through it; the stones gathered into heaps; it has been ploughed, harrowed, manured. If it were possible to obtain an accurate account of the labour thus directly incorporated with the land, its value at present prices would be found to fall little short, if it did not equal or exceed that of the land. But this is not all. School-houses and churches have been erected in the vicinity; roads have been constructed, leading to market-towns, that have themselves been built up; bridges, canals, and railways have been made, and all of them contribute something to the value of the land. How largely improved means of transportation enhance the price of the soil, whose products are carried by them, is matter of familiar observation It is impossible, however, to assign their shares with any accuracy to each of so many causes, many of them

acting simultaneously, and affecting large surfaces, and many from different periods. The removal of the overslaugh in the Hudson, below Albany, would add something to the value of every bushel of corn that passes through the Erie canal, and, of course, to that of the land on which it is grown: a break in that canal, interrupting its navigation for a week, is felt in every grain market in the Old Northwest Territory.

The only way to assign their proper influence to causes of such wide operation, is to take a large territory, and compare the price at which it is estimated, with that of the labour expended in its various improvements. Let us take the State of New York as an example. The cash value of the farms of this State, as ascertained by the census of 1850, is $554,546,642. The entire assessed value of real estate, as returned to the State Comptroller in the Fall of 1851, is $907,571,695. If we add the assessed value of the city property to that of the farms, as ascertained by the United States' census, it will exceed the aggregate valuation derived from the assessment rolls. These valuations were made by different officers, for different purposes, and in mutual ignorance of each other's ascertained results. The State assessment was made under a law passed subsequent to the taking of the census, and the information obtained by the census was not published until a year after the valuation by the County assessors. The latter is likely to be too low; the estimate of the marshals who took the census, being founded upon the statements of proprietors, not prone to depreciate their own farms, is quite likely to be high enough. That there is no greater discrepancy between the two, affords a strong presumption that neither is very remote from the truth. Nevertheless, to avoid all cavil, we propose to assume $1,200,000,000 as the value of the soil of New York, in its existing condition as to buildings and other improvements, public and private. This would pay for the labour of one million of men, working three hundred days in the year, at one dollar per day, for four years.

Let any one now picture the State as it was the day that Hendrick Hudson cast anchor in the Bay of Manhattan, and then consider whether a million of men could fell the forests, drain the swamps, make the roads, canals, and railways, quarry the stone, burn the

bricks, cut and saw the timbers, erect the buildings, public and private, and execute all the work, that has made the Empire State out of the hunting-grounds of the Iroquois and the Delawares, in four years, or in ten years. No one will conclude it possible, after a deliberate survey of the multitude of things to be accomplished. Still less will he believe that the labour which has actually been expended upon the soil, can be adequately represented by as low a figure as that of a million of men for four years. The work was,

in point of fact, wrought with inferior machinery and inferior mechanical skill to that which the labourer of the present day brings to his task; and, therefore, absorbed a much greater quantity of muscular exertion than would now be expended in reproducing the same effects.

We might take State after State, and exhibit the same discrepancy between the labour actually expended in the improvement of the soil, and that which its soil, covered with the improvements, would command if offered for sale. If there is anything peculiar to the States of our Confederacy, more than the fact that we can obtain more accurate statistics in regard to them than to the countries of the Old World, it is a circumstance which prevents them from exhibiting as great a deficiency in the value of their soil, compared with the cost of its improvements, as the kingdoms of Europe. The cultivation of the United States was begun and carried on by people, who were in an advanced state of civilization at the outset. If we take such a country as England, and endeavour to estimate the labour expended upon it since the landing of Julius Cæsar, we shall find that it must exceed enormously the amount of labour for which it would now exchange. The entire value of the real estate of Great Britain and Ireland, including mines, roads, &c., is estimated by statisticians at about £2,000,000,000 sterling, say, $10,000,000,000. This would purchase the labour of five millions of men for ten years, at the average wages of two hundred dollars per annum. Can any one believe this to be any approximation to the amount of labour which, during the eighteen centuries since the Roman invasion, has been devoted to the amelioration of the soil, or even to the amount of the better instructed and equipped labour of the present day, that would be requisite for reproducing the United Kingdom, if it