498 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



increased by man's action." * As a rule, economists who accept this 

 definition confine its application to the hire of land alone, although it 

 professes to include other things, " of all kinds," to which the same 

 description applies — namely, that they can not be increased in quan- 

 tity by any human action. There are, however, no such other things 

 specified, and in any literal sense there are no such other things ex- 

 isting, unless water and the atmosphere be intended. 



Now, although it is indisputably true that man by his action 

 can not increase the absolute or total quantity of land, any more than 

 of water and air, appertaining to the whole globe on which we live, 

 there is practically no limitation to the degree of value which man's 

 action can impart to land, and which is the only thing for which land 

 is wanted, bought, or sold, and which, as already shown, can be truly 

 made the subject of taxation. The tracts of land on the earth's sur- 

 face which are of no present marketable value are its deserts, its 

 wildernesses, the sides and summits of its mountains, and its con- 

 tinually frozen zones, where no results of labor are embodied in or 

 reflected upon it; while, on the other hand, its tracts of greatest 

 value are in the large cities and marts of trade and commerce, as in 

 the vicinity of the Bank of England, or in Wall Street, where the re- 

 sults of labor are so concentrated and reflected upon land that it is 

 necessary to cover it with gold in order to acquire by purchase a title 

 to it and a right to its exclusive use. The difference between land 

 at twenty-five dollars an acre and twenty-five dollars a square foot is 

 simply that the latter is or may be in the near future covered or sur- 

 rounded by capital and business, while the former is remote from 

 these sources of value. One of the greatest possible, perhaps prob- 

 able, outcomes of the modern progress of chemistry is that through 

 the utilization of microbic organizations the value of land as an in- 

 strumentality for the production of food may be increased to an ex- 

 tent that at the present time is hardly possible of conception. Again, 

 in the case of air and water, although their total absolute quantity 

 can not be increased, their available and useful quantity in any 

 place, as before shown, can be by the agency of man, and their use 

 made subject to hire or rent. 



Consideration is next asked to the question at issue from what 

 may be termed its practical standpoint. We have first a proposition 

 in the nature of an economic axiom, that the price of everything 

 necessary for production, or the hire of anything — land, money, and 

 the like — without which the product could not arise, is, and must be, 

 without exception, a part of the cost of that product; second, that 

 all levies of the State which are worthy of being designated as taxes 

 constitute an essential element of the cost of all products. The rent 



* Professor Marshall. 



