than the demand-which can not be made to yield all the produce required for the community, unless on terms still less advantageous than the resort to less favored soils. (1.) The worst land which can be cultivated as a means of subsistence is that which will just replace the seed and the food of the laborers employed on it, together with what Dr. Chalmers calls their secondaries; that is, the laborers required for supplying them with tools, and with the remaining necessaries of life. Whether any given land is capable of doing more than this is not a question of political economy, but of physical fact. The supposition leaves nothing for profits, nor anything for the laborers except necessaries: the land, therefore, can only be cultivated by the laborers themselves, or else at a pecuniary loss; and, a fortiori, can not in any contingency afford a rent. (2.) The worst land which can be cultivated as an investment for capital is that which, after replacing the seed, not only feeds the agricultural laborers and their secondaries, but affords them the current rate of wages, which extend to much more than mere necessaries, and leaves, for those who have advanced the wages of these two classes of laborers, a surplus equal to the profit they could have expected from any other employment of their capital. (3.) Whether any given land can do more than this is not merely a physical question, but depends partly on the market value of agricultural produce. What the land can do for the laborers and for the capitalist, beyond feeding all whom it directly or indirectly employs, of course depends upon what the remainder of the produce can be sold for. The higher the market value of produce, the lower are the soils to which cultivation can descend, consistently with affording to the capital employed the ordinary rate of profit.

may

As, however, differences of fertility slide into one another by insensible gradations; and differences of accessibility, that is, of distance from markets do the same; and since there is land so barren that it could not pay for its cultivation at any price; it is evident that, whatever the

price may be, there must in any extensive region be some land which at that price will just pay the wages of the cultivators, and yield to the capital employed the ordinary profit, and no more. Until, therefore, the price rises higher, or until some improvement raises that particular land to a higher place in the scale of fertility, it can not pay any rent. It is evident, however, that the community needs the produce of this quality of land; since, if the lands more fertile. or better situated than it could have sufficed to supply the wants of society, the price would not have risen so high as to render its cultivation profitable. This land, therefore, will be cultivated; and we may lay it down as a principle that, so long as any of the land of a country which is fit for cultivation, and not withheld from it by legal or other factitious obstacles, is not cultivated, the worst land in actual cultivation (in point of fertility and situation together) pays

no rent.

§ 3. If, then, of the land in cultivation, the part which yields least return to the labor and capital employed on it gives only the ordinary profit of capital, without leaving anything for rent, a standard [i. e., the "margin of cultivation"] is afforded for estimating the amount of rent which will be yielded by all other land. Any land yields just as much more than the ordinary profits of stock as it yields more than what is returned by the worst land in cultivation. The surplus is what the farmer can afford to pay as rent to the landlord; and since, if he did not so pay it, he would receive more than the ordinary rate of profit, the competition of other capitalists, that competition which equalizes the profits of different capitals, will enable the landlord to appropriate it. The rent, therefore, which any land will yield, is the excess of its produce, beyond what would be returned to the same capital if employed on the worst land in cultivation.

It has been denied that there can be any land in cultivation which pays no rent, because landlords (it is contended) would not allow their land to be occupied without payment.

Inferior land, however, does not usually occupy, without interruption, many square miles of ground; it is dispersed here and there, with patches of better land intermixed, and the same person who rents the better land obtains along with it the inferior soils which alternate with it. He pays a rent, nominally for the whole farm, but calculated on the produce of those parts alone (however small a portion of the whole) which are capable of returning more than the common rate of profit. It is thus scientifically true that the remaining parts pay no rent.

This point seems to need some illustration. Suppose that all the lands in a community are of five different grades of productiveness. When the price of agricultural produce was such that grades one, two, and three all came into cultivation, lands of poorer quality would not be cultivated. When a man rents a farm, he always gets land of varying degrees of fertility within its limits. Now, in determining what he ought to pay as rent, the farmer will agree to give that which will still leave him a profit on his working capital; if in his fields he finds land which would not enter into the question of rental, because it did not yield more than the profit on working it, after he rented the farm he would find it to his interest to cultivate it, simply because it yielded him a profit, and because he was not obliged to pay rent upon it; if required to pay rent for it, he would lose the ordinary rate of profit, would have no reason for cultivating it, of course, and would throw it out of cultivation. Moreover, suppose that lands down to grade three paid rent when A took the farm; now, if the price of produce rises slightly, grade four may pay something, but possibly not enough to warrant any rent going to a landlord. A will put capital on it for this return, but certainly not until the price warrants it; that is, not until the price will return him at least the cost of working the land, plus the profit on his outlay. But the community needed this land, or the price would not have gone up to the point which makes possible its cultivation even for a profit, without rent. There must always be somewhere some land affected in just this way.

§ 4. Let us, however, suppose that there were a validity in this objection, which can by no means be conceded to it; that, when the demand of the community had forced up food to such a price as would remunerate the expense of producing it from a certain quality of soil, it happened nevertheless

that all the soil of that quality was withheld from cultivation, the increase of produce, which the wants of society required, would for the time be obtained wholly (as it always is partially), not by an extension of cultivation, but by an increased application of labor and capital to land already cultivated.

Now we have already seen that this increased application of capital, other things being unaltered, is always attended with a smaller proportional return. The rise of price enables measures to be taken for increasing the produce, which could not have been taken with profit at the previous price. The farmer uses more expensive manures, or manures land which he formerly left to nature; or procures lime or marl from a distance, as a dressing for the soil; or pulverizes or weeds. it more thoroughly; or drains, irrigates, or subsoils portions of it, which at former prices would not have paid the cost of the operation; and so forth. The farmer or improver will only consider whether the outlay he makes for the purpose will be returned to him with the ordinary profit, and not whether any surplus will remain for rent. Even, therefore, if it were the fact that there is never any land taken into cultivation, for which rent, and that too of an amount worth taking into consideration, was not paid, it would be true, nevertheless, that there is always some agricultural capital which pays no rent, because it returns nothing beyond the ordinary rate of profit: this capital being the portion of capital last applied-that to which the last addition to the produce was due; or (to express the essentials of the case in one phrase) that which is applied in the least favorable circumstances. But the same amount of demand and the same price, which enable this least productive portion of capital barely to replace itself with the ordinary profit, enable every other portion to yield a surplus proportioned to the advantage it possesses. And this surplus it is which competition enables the landlord to appropriate.

If land were all occupied, and of only one grade, the first installment of labor and capital produced, we will say, twenty bushels of wheat; when the price of wheat rose, and it became

profitable to resort to greater expense on the soil, a second installment of the same amount of labor and capital when applied, however, only yielded fifteen bushels more; a third, ten bushels more; and a fourth, five bushels more. The soil now gives fifty bushels only under the highest pressure. But, if it was profitable to invest the same installment of labor and capital simply for the five bushels that at first had received a return of twenty bushels, the price must have gone up so that five bushels should sell for as much as the twenty did formerly; so, mutatis mutandis, of installments second and third. So that if the demand is such as to require all of the fifty bushels, the agricultural capital which produced the five bushels will be the standard according to which the rent of the capital, which grew twenty, fifteen, and ten bushels respectively, is measured. The principle is exactly the same as if equal installments of capital and labor were invested on four different grades of land returning twenty, fifteen, ten, and five bushels for each installment. Or, as if in the table on page 240, A, B, C, and D each represented different installments of the same amount of labor and capital put upon the same spot of ground, instead of being, as there, put upon different grades of land.

The rent of all land is measured by the excess of the return to the whole capital employed on it above what is necessary to replace the capital with the ordinary rate of profit, or, in other words, above what the same capital would yield if it were all employed in as disadvantageous circumstances as the least productive portion of it: whether that least productive portion of capital is rendered so by being employed on the worst soil, or by being expended in extorting more produce from land which already yielded as much as it could be made to part with on easier terms.

It will be true that the farmer requires the ordinary rate of profit on the whole of his capital; that whatever it returns to him beyond this he is obliged to pay to the landlord, but will not consent to pay more; that there is a portion of capital applied to agriculture in such circumstances of productiveness as to yield only the ordinary profits; and that the difference between the produce of this and of any other capital of similar amount is the measure of the tribute which that other capital can and will pay, under the name of rent, to the landlord. This constitutes a law of rent, as near the