"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."
