county, much more of all England or of all the world, being settled by the question-what is the degree of fertility? It is No. 5 land in fertility, it must pay No. One has only to take that rule into the land market to be laughed out of it as a dreamer. 5 rent. The eminent men who have treated of rent have not been ignorant of these facts. They have spoken of situation and other influences; nevertheless, they have struggled to leave the impression of a graduation of rent upon one principle, and though they have protected themselves against the charge of actually ignoring facts, they have taught the world to believe that political economy had discovered a beautiful theory of science, which could shed illumination over each and every settlement of the complicated inquiry, what the rent of a farm shall be. The mischief resulting from such an erroneous suggestion is always considerable, for it brings discredit on political economy as a science fit for theorists but as little corresponding with the facts of the living world. The accurate statement of the doctrine of rent is a valuable and useful explanation of the many elements of an intricate practical phenomenon, but it furnishes no rule which can be made to govern all its complications. It tells us what the facts are, and in what connection they stand with one another; but it leaves the landlord and the tenant to their practical sagacity and to arithmetic alone, for determining the actual rent which shall be paid for the farm. The relative importance to be assigned in this calculation at a given place to fertility, the number of horses and labourers to be employed, the rate or agricultural wages, access to markets, manure, and coals, the burden of tithes and poor rates, is utterly beyond the power of political economy to prescribe, yet, they are the very facts which determine the ultimate figures. The preceding explanation of the nature of rent shews the relation which it bears to tithes. Some few years ago, at the time when the disestablishment of the Irish Church was under debate, much discussion arose as to the incidence of tithe. On whom did it fall? Who was the person who really paid the tithe due upon the farm,the farmer or the landowner? The question can be decisively answered by the help of the analysis here given of rent. Tithe is a charge which must be met by the tenant who occupies the land. In the calculation above described, it will figure in the cost of the farming; it swells the expense at which the crop is raised. It will take its place by the side of poor-rate, or any other payment which must be encountered. It will be set off against the amount of money realised by the cultivation, and will diminish the final surplus which constitutes rent. Hence it necessarily follows that if the tenant was relieved from this charge, the surplus, which exceeds his proper profit, will be increased, and the whole of that surplus so increased will be claimed by the landlord. It could make no difference to the farmer whether he paid the same sum as tithe to the clergyman, or as additional rent to the landlord. His estimated profit, in either case, would be identically the same. It remains to notice one point which has not been spoken of in the preceding discussion. Writers on rent have for the most part assumed that there is agricultural land which yields no rent, and they have assigned great Ꮓ importance to this kind of land as furnishing the standard with which the rents of all lands is compared. This land, they allege, does nothing more than repay the expenses of cultivation; it generates no surplus which the landlord can claim as rent. Its bearing on the rents of other lands consists in its fixing the price of agricultural produce. Its products are required and will be bought; and consequently the selling price must be sufficiently high to maintain and repay its tillage. It thus determines the minimum of agricultural prices; they must be at the least high enough to bring the produce of this land to market. This assumption is correct. But the question immediately arises, where is this non-rent paying land to be found? Not in England, certainly. It is open to very serious doubt whether a single acre of cultivated land exists in England which yields no rent whatever to its owner; which he must either cultivate himself, obtaining from it only the ordinary profits of business, or else give it over to a tenant for nothing. I have never heard of the existence of such land, its position has never been pointed out, and even if a few acres of barren moor could be found which were tilled and yet gave no rent this would be utterly destitute of all importance, of all, influence over the rents of other lands; their quantity would be too insignificant to have any such effect. The lands which pay no rent, and yet fix the price of English rents, exist in America, and possibly in Russia, on the extremities of the outer ring of that tillage which supplies England with any considerable amount of food. They may be lands endowed with great fertility. Indeed it can be scarcely questioned that fields situated at such vast distances from the market, compelled to encounter such enormous cost of carriage, and owing to the scantiness of the population which cultivates them deprived of the resources of powerful agricultural machinery, must possess a high power of producing, if they overcome such formidable disadvantages. These are the regulators of English prices, the governors of general English rents. We may possibly add the names of Australia, the Pampas, and even India to the list, if ever chemical science succeeds in placing the meat and corn produced by these remote countries on a level with those of England. The high fertility of the distant lands from which England now procures a large proportion of her corn illustrates in a striking manner the fallacy of the Ricardo doctrine of rent. By founding rent on fertility, he necessarily implied that a rise of rent followed on the taking of inferior soils into cultivation. Land A, which previously repaid only cost of cultivation, and yielded no rent, now resigns its place to an inferior soil. Its produce is somewhat larger than this newly introduced land; the excess is rent. Land A now becomes land B, and every degree of fertility changes its letter. There is a rise of rent throughout the whole series. Hence the repeal of the corn laws was bound to lead to a fall of rents, for the land A of England could not be cultivated in competition with the better soils of foreign countries and their lower prices. So the landowners believed, and accordingly they resisted the abolition of protection. But what are the facts exhibited under the action of repeal? The lands which send corn to England possess, for the most part, very elevated degrees of fertility; but English rents are higher, and not as they were supposed to be upon the theory, lower. Repeal has raised rents. The cost of the American loaf is higher than the English loaf, but not from inferiority of fertility, but from expense of carriage. On the other hand, the English landowner has to deal with a population wielding a broader and more profitable trade; and he gathers up increased rent by supplying many wants, such as milk, butter, meal, and other articles, which a larger and richer population demands and can afford to pay for. Much has been made in treatises of political economy of the successive applications of capital to the same land, the diminished return for the outlays, and the consequent effect of this law upon rent. The principle is true, and the law is certain; but I cannot hold them to have any serious importance in the present state of the world. If the supply of food for the population of England were restricted to the fields of this island, it is beyond doubt that this law would instantly acquire tremendous significance. It would be hard to predict what height agricultural rents would reach under such circumstances. But thanks to steam and free trade, the fields of all the world are the fields of England; and many centuries will pass away before the diminished returns to successive doses of capital can have any practical importance. The doctrine of the diminishing returns, obtained by successive applications of capital to land, entered for much into Mr Mill's view of the rise of rent; and it is open, generally, to the remarks just made on Ricardo's principles of relative fertility. Rents rose in England upon the repeal of the Corn Laws, though the grain |