538 EEPORT— 1887. 



a fallacy to hold tliat rent falls jast in precise proportion to the fall in tlie 

 price of produce, so that if land yields four quarters an acre, and wheat 

 falls 11. per quarter, rent must fall 4?. per acre. Economic effects are 

 rarely so simple as that, and it is well that we should recognise that such 

 problems require for their solution more than mere arithmetic. 



And let us pause for a moment to dissipate another fallacy. Much 

 denunciation is levelled at present at landlords and at rent under the 

 belief that rent contributes to cost, and that when we sweep away rent 

 and landlords we shall have our wheat cheaper by exactly the amount 

 which the landlord now pockets. But no one who really follows up 

 rent to its source can entertain such an idea. In the case I have put, of 

 Argyll yielding wheat at a cost of 30*'. and the Lothians at a cost of 20s., 

 and the Lothians therefore getting a rent or margin of profit of 10s. per 

 quai'ter while Argyll just lived, what difference would arise if there was 

 no rent in the Lothians ? Would the Lothian farmer then sell his wheat 

 for 20s. if the farmer, say in Northumberland, was getting 27s. 6d. ? 

 Certainly not; he would get at least 27s. 6d., and the consumer would be 

 none the better, and none the wiser, although no landlord existed in the 

 Lothians to claim the tribute due to the extra fertility of that favoured 

 soil. Some foolish farmer may pay more than the extra fertility of the 

 soil he tills justifies, but as a whole the landlords will get just that which 

 measures the various grades of the extra fertility of their land ; and if 

 they didn't get it, some one else would, but that some one else would 

 obviously never be the consumer ; ]ie would pay the same price whoever 

 divided the spoils. The rise or fall of rent is the private affair of land- 

 lords and tenants, and is to the community a matter of the purest 

 indifference. 



Another fallacy, arising out of that just considered, and which this 

 closer definition of rent enables us to dispose of, is that the nltimate 

 sufferer from agricultural depression is the proprietor. He is not the first, 

 and he is not the last, to suffer : the average rent of the average land- 

 owner falls not immediately because prices fall, only indirectly and 

 mediately from that cause. The proximate cause of the fall of his rent is 

 the extinction of cultivation elsewhere, the narrowing of the margin of 

 cultivation ; and those who first suffer from that are the labourer and the 

 farmer, the possessors of those functions which exist for cultivation, and 

 operate antecedently to and are the causes of rent. Where there are no 

 leases, rent may fluctuate rapidly and unduly from panic and the accident 

 of seasons, but before the rent of the Lothians or Lincolnshire perma- 

 nently falls, the labour, capital, and skill employed in cultivating less 

 fertile regions must have perished or migrated. 



And, conversely, if by any natural agency the prices of agricultural 

 commodities should rise, or by any artificial method or process should be 

 raised, the proximate result would not be a raising of the rent of the 

 land in general ; it would be, first, an increased recompense to the labour, 

 skill, and capital employed on the richer lands ; second, the restoration to 

 cultivation of the next grade of land, inferring increased scope for labour, 

 capital, and .skill; and, third, a rise of rent, because by that increased 

 area of cultivation the margin had been widened, and the difference be- 

 tween the result of cultivating inferior and superior land had thereby 

 been deepened. 



There is therefore no antagonism in this combat with depression be- 

 tween rent, labour, and capital, — there is the closest identity of interest ; 



