ON THE THEORY OF EENT. 539 



and tte social cataclysm from the fall of prices, if it comes, will fall 

 ultimately and most severely on the poorer sections of those who depend 

 on the land. 



Having now considered what rent is, and shown liow the startling 

 statistics of the Agricultural Department corroborate and illustrate the 

 theory of its existence, we may consider another question, too often iden- 

 tified with the preliminary inquiry we have disposed of. Having dis- 

 covered rent, we have to consider how it can be best paid ; the fact of 

 rent and the method of ascertaining or regulating or paying rent are quite 

 different matters. 



There can be no doubt that, just as barter was the earliest form of 

 commerce, rent was originally paid by personal service or in kind ; but 

 that does not imply that there was any co-operation or any co-partnership 

 between the landlord and the tenant. The relation of landlord and tenant 

 in respect of rent varied according to the radical idea which underlay 

 that relation. In countries subject to Latin influences the radical idea 

 was certainly that of partnership ; the eminently equitable and liberal 

 tendency of Eoman practice and jurisprudence favoured that conception 

 of the relation. In Celtic and Saxon communities, and especially in the 

 former, the radical idea, when disentangled from that of service, was sale. 

 In Provence and Italy, a landlord took his share in the production and 

 cultivation of the soil, shared the fertility or sterility of tbe seasons, 

 shared also the skill or imbecility of the cultivator with whom he was 

 associated. In England, and still more in Scotland and in Ireland, the 

 landlord sold the use of the soil to the cultivator, not for a share in 

 its produce, but for a definite price, payable by instalments while the 

 tenure endui-ed. 



This distinction, which, has a very important bearing on present phe- 

 nomena, has been obscured by the circumstance that in ancient times, 

 and indeed until comparatively recently, rent was largely paid in kind, 

 and until still more recent times was often reckoned and measured by the 

 price of the produce. But the payment of rent in kind was due to the 

 incomplete condition of commerce, and to the difficulty of transport and 

 communication. It was diSicult, on the one side, for the tenant in any 

 distant part of the country to convert produce into money ; on the other 

 side it was very inconvenient for the landlord to procure supplies. 

 Society in these old times was very self-contained, and an old rental, in 

 Scotland at any rate, contained the most elaborate provision for victual- 

 ling the laird in meal, poultry, beef, mutton, flax, and all commodities, — 

 not, as some imaginative historians have supposed, from any overbearing 

 feudal pride, but from the far more vulgar circumstance that the laird 

 could hardly have lived unless he had been thus provisioned, and the 

 tenant would have had to trudge many a weary mile before he could get 

 the money. We must not, therefore, confuse the method of paying rent 

 in tliose days with the system of metayer cultivation, which at no time 

 prevailed in this country. 



The system of regulating the rent by the price of produce, which no 

 donbt had its origin in the necessities or convenience of an earlier age, 

 has in later times been often resorted to, especially where leases prevail, 

 in order to equalise and harmonise the oscillations of value. For many 

 years in a large part of Scotland rents were regulated by the price or 

 value of equal or varying quantities of the three grain crops of that 

 country — wheat, barley, and oats — and the varying proportions in which 



