lower those of the old territory of England. This is per fectly correct, and shows the fallacy of the test assumed by Mr. Carey. It is perhaps true that the whole land of the world would not sell for the expense of bringing it into its present state, plus the expense of making all the existing communications. The tendency of improved communications is to lower existing rents, by trenching on the monopoly of the land nearest to the places where large numbers of consumers are assembled. Roads and canals are not constructed to raise the value of the land which already supplies the markets, but (among other purposes) to cheapen the supply, by letting in the produce of other and more distant lands; and the more effectually this purpose is attained, the lower rent will be. If we could imagine that the railways and canals of the United States, instead of only cheapening communication, did their business so effectually as to annihilate cost of carriage altogether, and enable the produce of Michigan to reach the market of New York as quickly and as cheaply as the produce of Long Island-the whole value of all the land of the United States (except such as lies convenient for building) would be annihilated; or rather, the best would only sell for the expense of clearing, and the government tax of a dollar and a quarter per acre; since land in Michigan, equal to the best in the United States, may be had in unlimited abundance by that amount of outlay. But it is strange that Mr. Carey should think this fact inconsistent with the Ricardo theory of rent. Admitting all that he asserts, it is still true that as long as there is land which yields no rent, the land which does yield rent, does so in consequence of some advan tage which it enjoys, in fertility or vicinity to markets, ovei the other; and the measure of its advantage is also the measure of its rent. And the cause of its yielding rent, is that it possesses a natural monopoly; the quantity of land, as favourably circumstanced as itself, not being sufficient to supply the market. These propositions constitute the theory of rent, laid down by Ricardo; and if they are true, I cannot

see that it signifies much whether the rent which the land yields at the present time, is greater or less than the interest of the capital which has been laid out to raise its value, together with the interest of the capital which has been laid out to lower its value.*

* In a more recent work, entitled "The Past, the Present, and the Future," Mr. Carey takes another ground of objection to the Ricardo theory of rent, namely, that in point of historical fact, the lands first brought under cultivation are not the most fertile, but the barren lands. "We find the settler invariably occupying the high and thin lands requiring little clearing and no drainage; those which can yield but a small return to labour; and as invariably travelling down the hills, and clearing and draining the lower and richer lands as population and wealth increase. . . . . When population is small, and land consequently abundant, the work of cultivation is, and always must be, commenced upon the poorer soils. With the growth of population and wealth, other soils yielding a larger return to labour are always brought into activity, with a constantly increasing return to the labour expended upon them."

It is true that the lands which require the greatest amount of clearing and draining are seldom the first cultivated: it is probably the fact, that in new countries cultivation usually begins on the hills, and descends from these to the valleys; and for this reason it may not unfrequently happen (though certainly not by any invariable law) that the richest lands remain longer unoccupied than others which are less naturally productive, even in proportion to the smaller amount of labour and outlay which their cultivation requires. Mr. Carey, however, will hardly pretend that in any old country the uncultivated lands are generally those which would pay best for cultivation. But let us even concede the point, and suppose with Mr. Carey that the progress of cultivation is upwards, from the barren to the fertile lands, not downwards, from the fertile to the barren; and that the wastes (for example) of England, Scotland, and Ireland are precisely the portions of those countries which are destined hereafter to become the most largely remunerative of the labour employed on them. This, it will be admitted, is no trifling concession; but even this would form no objection to the law of rent as laid down in the present chapter. If Dartmoor and Shap Fells are really the most fertile land in England, when they come to be cultivated they will yield the highest rent, and the lands which at that time will pay no rent will probably be the Essex Levels and the Carse of Gowrie. In whatever order the lands come into cultivation, those which when cultivated yield the least return, in proportion to the labour required for their culture, will always regulate the price of agricultural produce; and all other lands will pay a rent simply equivalent to the excess of their produce over this minimum. Whatever unguarded expressions may have been occasionally used in describing the law of rent, these two propositions are all that was ever intended by it.

If indeed Mr. Carey could show that the return to labour from the land, agricultural skill and science being supposed the same, is not à diminishing re

Mr. Carey's objection, however, has somewhat more of ingenuity than the arguments commonly met with against the theory of rent; a theorem which may be called the pons asinorum of political economy, for there are, I am inclined to think, few persons who have refused their essent to it except from not having thoroughly understood it. The loose and inaccurate way in which it is often apprehended by those who affect to refute it, is very remarkable. Many, for instance, have imputed absurdity to Mr. Ricardo's theory, because it is absurd to say that the cultivation of inferior land is the cause of rent on the superior. [Mr. Ricardo does not say that it is the cultivation of inferior land, but the necessity of cultivating it, from the insufficiency of the superior land to feed a growing population between which and the proposition imputed to him there is no less a difference than that between demand and supply. Others again allege as an objection against Ricardo, that if all land were of equal fertility, it might still yield a rent. But Ricardo says precisely the same. He says that if all lands were equally fertile, those which are nearer to their market than others, and are therefore less burthened with cost of carriage, would yield a rent equivalent to the advantage; and that the land yielding no rent would then be, not the least fertile, but the least advantageously situated, which the wants of the community required to be brought into cultivation. It is also distinctly a portion of Ricardo's doctrine, that even apart from differences of situation, the land of a country supposed to be of uniform fertility would, all of it, on a certain supposition, pay rent, namely, if the demand of the community required that it should all be cultivated, and cultivated beyond the point at which a further application of capital begins to be attended with a smaller propor

turn, he would overthrow a principle much more fundamental than any law of rent. But in this he has wholly failed. It is not pretended that this natural law applies to a very early stage in the clearing and settlement of a country; and in this stage only have Mr. Carey's objections any shadow of foundation in the real order of the facts.

tional return. It would be impossible to show that, except by forcible exaction, the whole land of a country can yield a rent on any other supposition.

§ 6. After this view of the nature and causes of rent, let us turn back to the subject of profits, and bring up for reconsideration one of the propositions laid down in the last chapter. We there stated, that the advances of the capitalist, or in other words, the expenses of production, consist solely in wages of labour; that whatever portion of the outlay is not wages, is previous profit, and whatever is not previous profit, is wages. Rent, however, being an element which it is impossible to resolve into either profits or wages, we were obliged, for the moment, to assume that the capitalist is not required to pay rent—to give an equivalent for the use of an appropriated natural agent: and I undertook to show in the proper place that this is an allowable supposition, and that rent does not really form any part of the expenses of production, or of the advances of the capitalist. The grounds on which this assertion was made are now ap-y parent. It is true that all tenant farmers, and many other classes of producers, pay rent. But we have now seen, that whoever cultivates land, paying a rent for it, gets in return for his rent an instrument of superior power to other instruments of the same kind for which no rent is paid. The superiority of the instrument is in exact proportion to the rent paid for it. If a few persons had steam-engines of superior power to all others in existence, but limited by physical laws to a number short of the demand, the rent which a manufacturer would be willing to pay for one of these steam-engines could not be looked upon as an addition to his outlay, because by the use of it he would save in his other expenses the equivalent of what it cost him: without it he could not do the same quantity of work, unless at an additional expense equal to the rent. The same thing is true of land. The real expenses of production are those incurred on the worst land, or by the capital employed in the least

favourable circumstances. This land or capital pays, as we have seen, no rent: but the expenses to which it is subject, cause all other land or agricultural capital to be subjected to an equivalent expense in the form of rent. Whoever does pay rent, gets back its full value in extra advantages, and the rent which he pays does not place him in a worse position than, but only in the same position as, his fellowproducer who pays no rent, but whose instrument is one of inferior efficiency.

We have now completed the exposition of the laws which regulate the distribution of the produce of land, labour, and capital, as far as it is possible to discuss those laws independently of the instrumentality by which in a civilized society the distribution is effected; the machinery of Exchange and Price. The more complete elucidation and final confirmation of the laws which we have laid down, and the deduction of their most important consequences, must be preceded by an explanation of the nature and working of that machinery -a subject so extensive and complicated as to require a separate Book.