ON THE THEORY OF BENT. 549 



necessary consequence, the fall of rent ; and the fall of rent must have 

 been occasioned by a diminution of the area of cultivation. Bat for 

 thirty years after the repeal of the Corn Laws prices rose, rents rose, and 

 the area of cultivation enormously increased ; everything happened 

 which the originators of that legislation intended should not happen, and 

 nothing that had been prognosticated by them occurred. Countries 

 which abjured the principles of 1846 flourished not less luxuriantly than 

 countries which adopted thera, and those who adopted and abandoned 

 them flourished alike in the days of their faith and in those of their 

 apostasy. Why ? Because simultaneously with the repeal of the Com 

 Laws natural causes began to operate, which swept away all legislative 

 anticipations, as the rising tide obliterates the fortifications of children on 

 the sands. Let us deduce from this the lesson apt to the present crisis. 

 If the repeal of the Corn Laws proved absolutely impotent to reduce 

 rent, what reason have we to believe that their re-enactment would prove 

 more loyal to its design ? The growth of enterprise, the spread ot 

 communication, the wealth of resource which railroad and steamship 

 awakened ; above all, the vivifying flow of gold from regions which were 

 unknown when the seers of 1846 saw visions ; baffled, for thirty years, the 

 prognostications of those who promised to labour the spoils of which 

 protection had robbed it. But labour flourished, though land, instead of 

 languishing, grew with redoubled vigour. Is it not a safe deduction, 

 therefore, to draw that labour will languish when land decays ? As field 

 by field the area of cultivation narrows, and cottager after cottager 

 departs from the land he has tilled to swell the torrent of labour 

 in the cities,' those of us who have faith in the compensation of 

 natural causes may watch with interest when and how the scale will 

 begin to turn, the pendulum begin to swing. "Will skill and labour and 

 the land join hands to save themselves from the tide that threatens to 

 engulph them ? Or will some fresh impulse come from some unthought- 

 of source to prove that in economics, as in politics, the unexpected 

 always happens ? 



Third. — What has happened in other trades has occurred in agriculture. 

 Just as the burst of prosperity in 1871-3 stimulated into unhealthy 

 action the iron trade and other kindred trades, so the great burst of 

 agricultural prosperity has unduly stimulated the extension of cultivation^ 

 which means the rise of rent. Many acres have been toi-n out of their 

 native heath and bog, which have speedily yielded the little fertility they 

 had gathered in centuries from the oxygen of the atmosphere and the 

 decay of their own slender herbage, and have now become mere pabulum 

 for converting manure into produce, and will speedily relapse into their 

 native sterility, when the agriculturist discovers that the manure he buys 

 hardly returns more than its own cost. 



It is foolish to attribute the loss of rent from such land to any undue 



' It is a stupid complaint, made by many critics, that those who have recently 

 commented on agriciiltmal depression have no other remedy to suggest than the de- 

 population of the rural districts of the country. The depopulation is not presented 

 as a remedy for, but as a consequence of, depression. The physician who attempts 

 to diagnose is not to be blamed because he can prescribe no remedy ; the economist 

 may point out the nature and cause of depression, and its necessary and natural con- 

 sequences — it belongs to the practical politician to suggest the remedies ; and I have 

 failed to discover any great fertility of suggestion on the part of those who are the 

 sharpest critics and the most ready to sneer at the suggestions of others. 



