possible effects which may be produced in foreign countries by the remission of a particular tax may assume great importance. A minister who has taxes. to remit is brought face to face with motives of very different kinds. He has to weigh the inconveniences which belong to each separate tax, and further he must take into account the collective benefits which the abolition of a particular tax may bring. He may be justified in selecting for remission that tax which is perhaps less directly noxious than the other, but which may stand in the way of the acquisition of a great gain from an independent source. It would be open in principle and reason to the minister to apply his surplus to the abolition of one tax rather than of another, if thereby he can persuade a foreign country to reduce a tariff which impeded and injured English trade. Here the doctrine of reciprocal action has a perfectly legitimate application. No economical principle forbids the deed.

But though international treaties founded on joint remission of duties are free from any objection on the score of principle, it may be permitted to question their policy. At the best they are only a contrivance for combating the prejudices and the ignorance of foreign countries. They are devices for entrapping others under the appearance of a profitable gain into what they should do because it is right and beneficial. They aim at overcoming by a side-wind false notions about trade. in foreign lands, but on that very account they have a manifest tendency to perpetuate the errors. So long as foreign Governments look out for equivalents before they consent to reduce duties, so long will they be dis

inclined to study the natures of free trade and protection. There is an appearance of gain, of advantages won by the diplomatic art, of benefit extorted from foreigners, which turns the minds of statesmen away from the study of economical truth. It is the wiser and in the long run the more successful course, to preach the truth by reasoning and example.

CHAPTER X.*

THE DOCTRINE OF RENT.

RENT has long been a favourite field of economical investigation. The success which political economists are said to have achieved in determining the nature and laws of rent is commonly regarded as one of the most brilliant triumphs of the science. The doctrine of rent which has resulted from their researches is pointed to by many as one of the grandest proofs of the scientific character of political economy. Indeed some have gone so far as to assert that the established theory of rent inevitably demonstrates that political economy is a true deductive science, as rigorous in its method, as genuine a development of strictly reasoned inferences from first principles as even the constructions of geometry. A position thus splendid, won for a doctrine by the genius of so many men of distinguished ability, might seem to have lifted it up for ever above the reach of criticism. It might be thought as presumptuous to challenge its accuracy as to dispute the validity of the first propositions in Euclid. Nevertheless, I venture to submit, that this very pretension to convert the doctrine of rent into a foundation for claiming for political economy the character of a deductive science furnishes ample warrant for a re-examination of that doctrine.

Read before the Manchester Statistical Society, March 13, 1872.

The theory of rent, whatever else it may be, most assuredly is not a product of deductive reasoning. Rent is a complex fact of the outward, concrete, material world; it must be studied in its objective and actually existing form before its nature can be ascertained. Its elements have to be discovered before they can be put together in a theory. Its phenomena must be sifted, what is accidental separated from what is permanent, before we can reach its laws; in a word, it must be first subjected to analysis before its elements can be handled by synthesis. All these processes are those which distinguish analytical sciences. They are not expansions of a first principle or of a definition; they are searches after facts, inquiries after laws which are not emanations of the pure reason, but only combinations of discerned relations. Thus the science of rent, if there be one, stands on the same identical ground with chemistry, or any other acknowledged analytical science. Now it is a peculiarity of all analytical science that it is perpetually open to re-examination. It can allege no necessary inherent unalterable nature of its laws. Still more, it can give no absolute, even certain, guarantee of the completeness and accuracy of the investigation, on which the formulas which are called its laws repose. The noblest product of analytical reasoning, the great law of gravitation, is at this hour the object of incessant inquiry. Few astronomers, if any, will now venture to affirm that the law of the inverse square of the distance is anything more than a fact, and a fact moreover which no one can assure us holds good at all times and in all regions. And if the generalisations of astronomy may be perpetually questioned, it is no act of extravagant

presumption to submit the utterances of the doctrine of rent to revision.

When then is rent? What is the subject-matter of this discussion? It is a fact of the every day world, an event of incessant occurrence in the actual material life of mankind. We will not say with Professor Cairns that "Rent is a complex phenomenon arising from the play of human interest, when brought in contact with the actual physical conditions of the soil, in relation to the physiological character of vegetable productions." That is too scientific for us, supposing it even to be intelligible. We will say rather that it is the consideration paid for the loan of land, the price stipulated for the lending of a particular machine. Rent, in legal phrase and common language, includes the payment annually given for borrowing every kind of land; but in political economy the expression is usually limited to the hire of agricultural land, that is, of land borrowed as a machine for the production of such wealth as is obtained from its cultivation. Land borrowed in towns, whether to serve as sites for ordinary houses, or as instruments for purposes of business and profit, such as wharfs, ground for the erection of factories and workshops, and the like, falls into a separate category. The considerations which govern the conditions of the hiring are essentially different, if not entirely in principle, at least in form and manner of operation, from those which prevail with agricultural land, and consequently do not admit of being examined in a common investigation, nor of yielding common results and identical rules of action. Our concern here is with the rent of agricultural land as discussed in treatises of political economy, and with

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