Author: Unknown
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

LECTURE IV.

Bent.

We have spoken of Wages and of Profits. We have now to speak of Rent.

Rent is what is paid for the use of Land. Rent is an element of price in a different way from Wages and Profits.

Smith, p. 67, speaks as follows:

“Rent, it is to be observed, therefore, enters into the composition of the price of commodities in a different way from wages and profit. High or low wages and profit are the causes of high or low price; high or low rent is the effect of it. It is because high or low wages and profit must be paid in order to bring a particular commodity to market, that its price is high or low. But it is because its price is high or low, a great deal more, or very little more, or no more, than what is sufficient to pay those wages and profit, that it affords a high.

rent, or a low rent, or no rent at all.”

Smith’s view of the gradations of rent in different kinds of land is excellent.

He begins from the fundamental principle that land almost everywhere can produce more food than is expended in raising the produce and replacing the stock.

Something therefore always remains for rent to the Landlord.

He then takes examples (Smith, pp. 67-69)

“The most desert moors in Norway and Scotland produce some sort of pasture for cattle, of which the milk and the increase are always more than sufficient, not only to maintain all the labour necessary for tending them, and to pay the ordinary profit to the farmer or owner of the herd or flock, but to afford some small rent to the landlord. The rent increases in proportion to the goodness of the pasture. The same extent of ground not only maintains a greater number of cattle, but as they are brought within a smaller compass, less labour becomes requisite to tend them, and to collect their produce. The landlord gains 1)0th ways; by the increase of the produce, and by the diminution of the labour which must be maintained upon it.

The rent of land not only varies with its fertility, whatever be its produce, but with its situation, whatever be its fertility. Land in the neighbourhood of a town gives a greater rent than land equally fertile in a distant part of the country. Though it may cost no more labour to cultivate the one than the other, it must always cost more to bring the produce of the distant land to market. A.

greater quantity of labour, therefore, must be maintained out of it; and the surplus, from which are drawn both the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord, must be diminished. But in remote parts of the country, the rate of profits, as has already been shewn, is generally higher than in the neighbourhood of a large town. A smaller proportion of this diminished surplus, therefore, must belong to the landlord.

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements. They encourage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the most extensive circle of the country. They are advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its neighbourhood. They are advantageous even to that part of the country. Though they introduce some rival commodities into the old market, they open many new markets to its produce. Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can never be universally established, but in consequence of that free and universal competition which forces every body to have recourse to it for the sake of self-defence. It is not more than fifty years ago, that some of the counties in the neighbourhood of London petitioned the Parliament against the extension of the turnpike-roads into the remoter counties. Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness of labour, would be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than themselves, and would thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their cultivation. Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has been improved since that time.

“A cornfield of moderate fertility produces a. much greater quantity of food for man, than the best pasture of equal extent. Though its cultivation requires much more labour, yet the surplus which remains, after replacing the seed, and maintaining all that labour, is likewise much greater. If a pound of butcher’s meat, therefore, was never supposed to be worth more than a pound of bread, this greater surplus would every where be of greater value, and constitute a greater fund, both for the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord. It seems to have done so universally in the rude beginnings of agriculture.

“But the relative values of these two different species of food, bread and butcher’s meat, are very different in the different periods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings the unimproved wilds, which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are all abandoned to cattle. There is more butcher’s meat than bread, and bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest competition, and which consequently brings the greatest price. At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals (one-and-twenty pence half penny sterling) was forty or fifty years ago the ordinary price of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. lie says nothing of the price of bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable about it. An ox there, he says, costs little more than the labour of catching him. But corn can nowhere be raised without a great deal of labour; and in a country which lies upon the river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, the money price of labour could not be very cheap. It is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of the country. There is then more bread than butcher’s meat. The competition changes its direction, and the price of butcher’s meat becomes greater than the price of bread.

“By the extension besides of cultivation, the unimproved wilds become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher’s meat. A great part of the cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and fattening cattle, of which the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour necessary for tending them, but the rent which the landlord and the profit which the farmer could have drawn from such land. employed in tillage. The cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the same price as those which are reared upon the most improved land. The proprietors of those moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion to the price of their cattle. It is not more than a century ago, that in many parts of the highlands of Scotland butcher’s meat was as cheap, or cheaper, than even bread made of oatmeal. The union opened the market of England to the highland cattle. Their ordinary price is at present about three times greater than at the beginning of the century, and the rents of many highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled in the same time. In almost every part of Great Britain, a pound of the best butcher’s meat is, in the present times, generally worth more than two pounds of the best white bread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes worth three or four pounds.

“It is thus that in the progress of improvement, the rent and profit of unimproved, pasture come to be regulated in some measure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and these again by the rent and profit of corn. Corn is an annual crop; butcher’s meat a crop which requires four or five years to grow. As an acre of land, therefore, will produce a much smaller quantity of the one species of food than of the other, the inferiority of the quantity must be compensated by the superiority of the price. If it was more than compensated, more corn land would be turned into pasture and if it was not compensated, part of what was in pasture would be brought back into corn.

“This equality, however, between the rent and profit of grass and those of corn, of the land of which the immediate produce is food for cattle, and of that of which the immediate produce is food for men, must be understood to take place only through the greater part of the improved lands of a great country. In some particular local situations it is quite otherwise, and the rent and profit of grass are much superior to what can be made by corn.

“Thus in the neighbourhood of a great town the demand for milk and for forage to horses frequently contribute, together with the high price of butcher’s meat, to raise the value of grass above what may be called its natural proportion to that of corn. This local advantage, it is evident, cannot be communicated to the lands at a distance.

“Particular circumstances I have sometimes rendered some countries so populous, that the whole territory, like the lands in the neighbourhood of a great town, has not been sufficient to produce both the grass and the corn necessary for the subsistence of their inhabitants. Their lands, therefore, have been principally employed in the production of grass, the more bulky commodity, and which cannot be so easily brought from a great distance; and corn, the food of the great body of the people, has been chiefly imported from foreign countries. Holland is at present in this situation, and a considerable part of ancient Italy seems to have been so during the prosperity of the Romans. To feed [cattle] well, old Cato said, as we are told by Cicero, was the first and most profitable thing in the management of a private estate; to feed tolerably well, the second; and to feed ill, the third. To plough, he ranked only in the fourth place of profit and advantage. Tillage, indeed, in that part of ancient Italy, which lay in the neighbourhood of Rome, must have been very much discouraged by the distributions of corn, which were frequently made to the people, either gratuitously, or at a very low price. This corn was brought from the conquered provinces, of which several, instead of taxes, were obliged to furnish a tenth part of their produce at a state(l price, about sixpence a peck, to the Republic. The low price at which this corn was distributed to the people must necessarily have sunk the price of what could be brought to the Roman market from Latium, or the ancient territory of Rome, and must have discouraged its cultivation in that country.

“In an open country too, of which the principal produce is corn, a well-inclosed piece of grass will frequently rent higher than any cornfield in its neighbourhood. It is convenient for the maintenance of the cattle employed in the cultivation of the corn, and its high rent is, in this case, not so properly paid from the value of its own produce, as from that of the corn lands which are cultivated by means of it. It is likely to fall, if ever the neighbouring lands are completely inclosed. The present high rent of inclosed land in Scotland seems owing to the scarcity of inclosure, and will probably last no longer than that scarcity. The advantage of inclosure is greater for pasture than for corn.

It saves the labour of guarding the cattle, which feed better too when they are not liable to be disturbed by their keeper or his dog.

“But where there is no local advantage of this kind, the rent and profit of corn, or whatever else is the common vegetable food of the people, must naturally regulate, upon the land which is fit for producing it, the rent and profit of pasture.

“The use of the artificial grasses, of turnips, carrots, cabbages, and the other expedients which have been fallen upon to make an equal quantity of land feed a greater number of cattle than when in natural grass, should somewhat reduce, it might be expected, the superiority which, in an improved country, the price of butcher’s meat naturally has over that of bread. It seems accordingly to have done so; and there is some reason for believing that, at least in the London market, the price of butcher’s meat, in proportion to the price of bread, is a good deal lower in the present times than it was in the beginning of the last century.”

Thus Rent is the result of the monopoly of the Land in a certain way.

But the operation of this monopoly according to the progress of a country in wealth and population, and also in skill, may lie followed into some further propositions : and these propositions compose what has in more recent times been called the Doctrine of Rent.

The Doctrine of Rent is briefly this: that the Rent of land is the payment for the excess of value of the better land over the poorest land which can be cultivated without loss.

This Doctrine is regarded as a very important point in Political Economy. Mr Mill says that this Doctrine of Rent is the Pons Asinorurn of Political Economy:that is, like the celebrated fourth Proposition of Euclid’s Elements, it affords a test whether the student has a capacity for understanding demonstrative reasoning on the subject which is placed before him.

On the history of this doctrine Mr McCulloch speaks as follows: “The theory of rent was first promulgated and satisfactorily established in a tract on the corn laws published in 1777, by Dr James Anderson, a native of Hermandston in Midlothian. Anderson was at the period referred to, extensively engaged in farming in Aberdeenshire; but having removed to London in 1797, he edited various publications, and among others, `Observations in Agriculture, and Natural History, &c.,’ in which he gave a clear and able exposition of the nature, origin, and progress of rent. But notwithstanding these repeated publications, it does not appear that his profound and important disquisitions attracted any attention. And so completely were they forgotten that when Sir Edward West and Mr Malthus published their tracts on rent, in 1815, they were universally regarded as the real authors of the theory. There is, we believe, no question as to their originality; but it may well be doubted whether they succeeded in explaining the theory as well as it had been explained about forty years before.”