128 History of the English Laitded Interest. 



rent for tlie enjoyment not only of the original indestructible 

 powers of tlie soil, but of its acquired and partly indestructible 

 powers contributed subsequently by the landlord's capital. 

 As it is generally impossible to discriminate between what is 

 due to pristine fertility and what is due to permanent improve- 

 ments, the landlord has to suffer that portion of his income 

 which is really profit to follow the laws of rent. Hence he is 

 always liable to lose a portion of this revenue by the exhaustive 

 or slovenly farming of his tenantry. On the other hand, in 

 the days prior to the Agricultural Holdings Acts, he often, as 

 Adam Smith takes care to point out, obtained an augmentation 

 of such profits by being able to increase his rents out of capital 

 left in the land by an outgoing tenant. 



Marshall, in these modern times, has carefully differentiated 

 the somewhat general term of "producer's profits" by distin- 

 guishing that portion of it due to the landowner as rents and 

 quasi rents. It is premature to examine the latest phases of 

 this theory of rents, but we may briefly add that the more the 

 term signifies profits on capital and loses its earlier meaning, 

 the more fallacious do the theories of Smith and Ricardo 

 become. But in the chapters which more immediately follow, 

 it will be well to bear in mind that economists imagined that 

 State aid to agriculture only assisted the landlord and the 

 sources of direct taxation. As long as the land impost and 

 poor rates were paid regularly, the prosperity of the landlord 

 would perforce become a very secondary consideration to 

 statesmen, and the only reason for leaviug him his Corn Laws 

 as long as they did leave them was, probably, because during 

 the naval war with France it was thought safer to possess as 

 much available home-grown wheat as possible. Nor was 

 active opposition to land-owning rights to be expected as long 

 as rents were not considered to affect prices, and the landlord 

 was seen to be expending his profits in the development of 

 agriculture. Ricardo's theory of rents was likely to hold 

 its ground so long as competition for farms continued, and 

 that would be while the producer retained his monopoly in 

 the home market. To Adam Smith, however, the relationship 

 of the landlord with the community appeared in quite a 



