As most of the symptoms of a higher civilization become apparent earliest, and in the most striking manner, in large cities, so also a rise in rents is first felt in them. The building of houses may be considered as the most intensive of all cultivation of land and that which is most firmly fixed to the soil. Rent has nowhere an unsurpassable maximum any more than a necessary minimum.

etc., at £20,000,000; about 1771, A. Young, at £16,000,000; about 1800, Beeke, Observations on the Income-Tax, at £20,000,000; about 1804, Wakefield, Essay on Political Economy, at £28,000,000; about 1838, McCulloch, Statist., I, 535, at £29,500,000. The poor tax in England and Wales, in 1841, was on a valuation of £32,655,000. (Porter, Progress, VI, 2, 614); 1864-5, the annual value of lands, £46,403,853 (Stat. Journal, 1869.) Moreover, the income from houses, railroads etc. (real property other than lands), increased very much more than that received from pieces of farming land; between 1845 and 1864-5, the former by 392.8 per cent., and the latter by 27.9 per cent. (Hildebrand's Jahrbb., 1869, II, 383 seq,); and the income tax of 1857 on £47,109,000. There was a still more rapid growth of rent in Scotland. In 1770, it was only £1,000,000-1,200,000: in 1795, £2,000,000; in 1842, £5,586000. (McCulloch, I, 576, ff.) In Ireland, about 1776, it was only $900,000, according to Petty. (Political Anatomy of Ireland, I, 113.) A. Young assumed it to be £6,000,000 in 1778; Newenham, View of Ireland, about 1808, £15,000,000. In many parts of the Rosendale Forest in Lancashire, the land is leased by the ell, at £121, and even at £131 per acre; i. e., more than the whole forest of 15,300 acres was rented for in the time of James I. In many of the moor-land portions of Lancashire, rent has risen in 150 years, 1,500 and even 3,000 per cent. (Edinburg Rev., 1843, Febr., 223.)

The amount of rents in Prussia, Krug assumed to be in 1804, 50,000,000 thalers, and von Viebahn, Zollverein Statistik, II, 974, in 1862, 116,500,000 thalers. Lavergne assumed the rents of France after 1850 to be 1,600,000,000 francs (Revue des deux Mondes, Mars, 1868); and Dutot, Journal des Economistes, Juin, 1870, in 1870, at 2,000,000,000. In Norway, the capitalized value of all the land was assessed at 13,000,000,000 thalers in specie, in 1665; in 1802, at 25,500,000; in 1839, at 64,000,000 thalers. Blom, Statistik von Norwegen, I, 145. The older such estimates are, the more unreliable they are. 5 In Paris, in 1834, the square toise=37 sq. feet, in the Rue Richelieu and Rue St. Honoré, cost 1,500 to 2,000 francs; in Rue neuve Vivienne, 2,500 to 3,500 francs; in 1857, from 200 to 500 francs per square meter, 10 sq. feet, was very usual. (Wolowski.) Before the gates of Paris, the rent amounted to as high as 250 francs per hectare; at Fontainebleau, to only from 30 to 40. (Journal des Economistes, Mars, 1856, 337.) In Market Square, Philadelphia, land was worth from 3,000 to 4,000 francs per sq. toise, and in Wall

=

SECTION CLVII.

HISTORY OF RENT.-IMPROVEMENTS IN THE ART OF AGRICULTURE.

Improvements in the art of agriculture which are confined to individual husbandmen leave rent unaffected. They do not perceptibly lower the price of agricultural products, and only effect an increase of the reward of enterprise which is entirely personal to the more skillful producers and does not attach to the ground itself.

But how is it when these improvements become general throughout the country? If population and consumption remain unchanged, the supply of agricultural products will exceed the demand. This would compel farmers, if there be no avenue open to exports, to curtail their production. The least fertile and most disadvantageously situated parcels of land will be abandoned to a greater or less extent, and the least productive capital devoted to agriculture, withdrawn. In this way, rent goes down both relatively and absolutely, although the owners of land may be able to partially cover their loss by the gain which results to them as consumers and capitalists. (186). After a time, however, and as a conseStreet, New York, about 4,000 francs. (M.Chevalier, Letters sur l'Amérique, 1836, I, 355.) In St. Petersburg, after 6 years, the house frequently falls to the owner of the area. (Storch. by Rau, I, 248 f.) In Manchester, the Custom House area cost from 10 to 12 pounds sterling per square yard; in the center of the city, as high of £40, that is, nearly £200,000 per acre. In Liverpool, in the neighborhood of the Exchange and of Town Hall, the cost is from 30 to 40 pounds sterling. (Athenæum, Dec. 4, 1852.) In London, a corner building on London street, erected for £70,000, with only three front windows, pays a rental of £22,000. (Allg. Zeitung, 1 Febr., 1866.) The villa at Misenum a very beautiful location - which the mother of the Gracchi bought for about 5,000 thalers, came into the possession of L. Lucullus, consul in the year B. C. 74, for about 33 times as much. Mommsen, Römisch. Gesch., II, 382.

1 Since it has seemed absurd to many writers to say that an improvement in the art of agriculture may cause rents to decline (compare Malthus, Principles, I, ch. 3, 8), John Stuart Mill, Principles, IV, ch. 3, § 4, prefers

quence of the diminished price of corn, population and consumption will increase, and entail an extension of agriculture and a consequent rise in rents.2 If it, relatively speaking, reaches the same point as before, it still is absolutely much greater than before. Let us suppose that there are three classes

to put the question thus: whether the landowner is not injured by the improvement of the estates of other people, although his own is included in the improvement. Compare Davenant, Works, I, 361. And so the long agricultural crisis through which Germany passed at the beginning of the third decade of this century was produced mainly by the great impulse given to agriculture (Thaer, Schwerz etc.), while population did not keep pace with it. Similarly, at the same time, in England, McCulloch, Stat., I, 557 ff. Of course, the less fertile pieces of land declined even relatively most in price. From 1654 to 1663, Switzerland experienced a severe agricultural crisis, attended with oppressive cheapness of corn, a great decline in the price of land, innumerable cases of insolvency, revolts of the peasantry, emigration, etc. (Meyer von Knonau, Handbuch d. schweiz. Gesch., II, 43.) The Swiss had, precisely during the Thirty Years' War which spared them, so extensively developed their agricultural interests, that now that other countries began to compete with them, they could not find a market large enough for their products. For English instances of similar "agricultural distress" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Child, Discourse on Trade, 73, 124 seq.; Temple, Observations upon the U. P., ch. 6; Tooke, History of Prices, I, 23 seq., 42. Even where there have been no technic improvements, a series of unusually good harvests may have the same results, of which there are many instances scattered through Tooke's first volume.

There is great importance attached in England to the difference between those agricultural reforms which save land and those which effect a saving in capital and labor. The latter, it is said, decrease the money rent of the land owner by depreciating the price of corn, but leave the corn-rent unaltered. The former, on the other hand, decrease the rent both in money and but the money rent in a higher degree. (Ricardo, Principles, ch. 2; F. S. Mill, Principles, IV, ch. 3, 4.

corn,

2 When the demand for products of the soil which minister to luxury, such as fat meat, milk, vegetables, is increasing, a greater cheapness of the necessary wheat may raise rent, for the reason that lands are now cultivated which were not formerly tillable. Thus, there is now land in Lancashire which could not formerly be planted with corn, because the laborers would have consumed more than the harvest yielded. Since the large imports of the means of subsistence from Ireland these lands have been transformed into artificial meadows, gardens etc. (Torrens, The Budget, 180 ff.) Compare Adam Smith, I, 257, ed. Bas. Banfield would misuse these facts to overturn the theory of Ricardo. (Organization of Industry, 1848, 49 ff.)

VOL. II-3

of land of equal extent in a country, which for an equal outlay of capital produce 100,000, 80,000 and 70,000 bushels yearly. The rent of the land here would be equal to at least 40,000 bushels. If the yield of production now doubles, while the demand for agricultural products also doubles, the aggregate harvest will be 200,000+160,000+140,000 bushels, and consequently rent will have risen to at least S0,000 bushels. But this increase of rent has injured no one. If the population increases in a less degree than the productiveness of the land, the consumer may, to a certain extent, gain largely, and the land-owner better his condition. However, great agricultural improvements spread so gradually over a country, that, as a rule, the demand for agricultural products can keep pace with the increased supply. But even in this case, that transitory absolute decline of rent may be avoided; and it cannot be claimed universally, as it is by many who are satisfied with mumbling Ricardo's words after him, that an increase of rent is possible only by an enhancement of the price of the products of the soil. Where the development of a people's economy is a normal one, the rent of land is wont to increase gradually, but at the same time to constitute a diminishing quota of the entire national income.3

Improvements in milling, and in the instruments of trans

3 The French testamentary tax was on an amount,

In 1835, of 552 mill. francs moveable property and 984 mill. immoveable. In 1853, of 820

แ

1,176 1,545

In 1860, of 1,179 So that the preponderance of immoveable property constituted a converging series of 78, 43, and 31 per cent. (Parieu.) In North America, with its great unoccupied territory, the reverse is the case. The census of 1850 gave a moveable property of 36 per cent.; that of 1860 of only 30 per cent. According to Dubost, the rent of land in Algeria was 80 per cent., a gross product of only 10-15 francs per hectare; in Corsica, 66 per cent., a gross yield of from 30-35 per cent.; in the Department du Nord, 17.5-24 per cent., a gross yield of from 500-740 francs. (Journal des Economistes, Juin, 1870, 336 ff.)

The repeated sifting of the bran (mouture économique) had great influence in this respect. In France, in the sixteenth century, a setier of wheat gave

5

portation adapted to agricultural products, and the introduction of cheaper food, have the same effect as improvements of agricultural production. All such steps in advance render an increase in population, or in the nation's resources, possible without any corresponding increase in the amount paid to landowners as tribute money.

only 144 pounds of bread. In 1767, according to Malouin, L'Art du Bonlanger, it gave 192 pounds. It now gives from 223 to 240 pounds. The gain in barley is still greater; the setier gives 115 pounds of flour, formerly only 58. (Roquefort, Histoire de la Vie Privée des Français, I, 72 ff. Beckmann, Beitr. zur Gesch. der Erfind., II, 54.)

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the counties in the neighborhood of London addressed a petition to Parliament against the extension of the building of turnpike roads which caused their rents to decline, from the competition of distant districts. (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nat., I, ch. 11, 1.) Compare Sir J. Stewart, Principles, I, ch. 10. Improvements in transportation which affect the longest and shortest roads to a market in an absolutely equal degree, as, for instance, the bridging of a river very near the market, leave rent unaffected. (von Mangoldt, V. W. L., 480.)

* Malthus, Principles, 231 ff. If the laboring class were to become satisfied with living on potatoes instead of meat and bread as hitherto, rents would immediately and greatly fall, since the necessities of the people might then be obtained from a much smaller superficies. But after a time, the consequent increase in population might lead to a much higher rent than before; since a great deal of land too unfertile for the cultivation of corn might be with potatoes, and thus the limits of cultivation be reached much

sown later.

In France, between 1797 and 1847, the average price of wheat did not rise at all. Hipp. Passy mentions pieces of land which produced scarcely 12 hectolitres of wheat, but which now produce 20-an increased yield of 170 francs, attended by an increase in the cost of only 75 francs. (Journal des Economistes, 15 Oct., 1848.) Moreover, it may be that a not unimportant part of modern rises in the price of corn may be accounted for by the better quality of the corn caused by higher farming. (Inama Sternbeg, Gesch. der Preise, 10 seq.) Such facts, readily explainable by Ricardo's theory, remove the objection of Carey, Banfield and others, that the condition of the classes who own no land has, since the middle ages, unquestionably improved. Political Economy would be simply a theory of human degradation and impoverishment, if the law of rent was not counteracted by opposing causes. (Ræsler, Grundsätze, 210.) According to Berens, Krit. Dogmengeschichte, 213, the actual highness of rent is to be accounted for by the antag onism between the " soil-law (Bodengesetz) of the limited power of vegetation,"