300 PRINCIPLES OF RURAL ECONOMICS 



when he has the use of a certain piece of land, over and above 

 what he could produce if he did not have the use of it. That is 

 what determines the price he can afford to pay for it. The pres- 

 ence of free land and the possibility of substituting some of it 

 for the land which he is considering, is only one, and that not 

 the most important, factor in the larger and more immediate 

 problem of how much it is worth for use. 



One special difficulty with the differential theory of rent, as 

 commonly stated, is that the same piece of land is worth differ- 

 ent sums to different men. To take an extreme case, an acre of 

 land is worth very little to an Indian who is not yet civilized, 

 and who uses it principally for hunting. By such a method it 

 takes hundreds of acres to furnish a rather meager living to 

 an Indian family. To a white farmer the same acre is worth a 

 great deal more than it is to the Indian hunter, and for this 

 reason the former can afford to pay the hunter more than the 

 land is worth to him and still make a very good bargain. 



But, for the same reason, the same acre of land is worth a 

 great deal more to a highly skilled scientific farmer than it is to 

 a shiftless, unbusinesslike farmer. Since the former can make 

 an acre produce so much more than the latter can, and at lower 

 cost, the former can pay more for the land than the latter can. 

 If the unskillful farmer is already in possession, it is only nec- 

 essary to offer him as much as or a little more than the land is 

 worth to himself. This the more skillful farmer is easily able to 

 do, either as renter or purchaser. Thus the land tends to pass 

 into the hands of the more skillful farmers. 1 



Again, there are great differences in the ways in which vari- 

 ous kinds of land respond to skillful and scientific treatment. 

 Land which does not respond to such treatment may be worth 

 very little more to the scientific or successful than to the 



1 Cf. an excellent article by Henry C. Taylor, " The Differential Rent of 

 Farm Land," in the Quarterly Journal of Economics for August, 1903. 



