192 THE LAND AND ITS PROBLEMS 



all improvements out of his capital, and generally speaking 

 these improvements, houses, roads, fences, drains, etc, 

 which have been effected, say, within the period of the last 

 fifty or sixty years represent an amount of capital equal to 

 the selling value of the land. If a man buys a farm he is 

 either paying for the value of the improvements and nothing 

 for the land, or if he likes to say he is paying for the land 

 itself, then he is paying nothing for the improvements. 



In fairness to the agricultural landowner this distinction 

 between himself and the urban landowner should be borne 

 in mind when questions of rent are discussed. 



In the writer's book, The Land and the Empire, published 

 in 1917, he attempted, with much diffidence, to give a defini- 

 tion of rent from the purely practical point of view : this was 

 as follows : — 



" The price of land and the rate of rent is fixed by the value 

 of the land to the cultivator, influenced by the consideration : 

 Can he make his living oft' land bought or rented at a given 

 price ? And although the law of supply and demand un- 

 doubtedly affects the price of land, it is much more affected 

 by other considerations, for example, the standard of skill, 

 intelligence and energy of the race of cultivators, the presence 

 of conditions favourable to the industry and the state of 

 organization of the industry." 



Some two years later the writer read List's National 

 System of Political Economy, in which the question of rent 

 is dealt with in an interesting way, and from the practical 

 rather than the theoretic point of view he says : 



" Ricardo, and after him Mill, M'Culloch and others, are 

 of opinion that rent is paid on account of the natural produc- 

 tive fertility inherent in the land itself. Ricardo has based a 

 whole system on this notion. If he had made an excursion 

 to Canada he would have been able to make observations 

 there in every valley, on every hill, which would have con- 

 vinced him that his theory is based on sand. As he, however, 

 only took into account the circumstances of England he fell 

 into the erroneous idea that the English fields and meadows 



