770 REPORT — 1895. 



missioners to the Royal Commission it would appear that the county of Suffolk 

 shares with its neighbour, Essex, an unenvied pre-eminence among districts which 

 have suffered, and that the present condition of this important industry borders 

 here on despair. In the actual words of Mr. Wilson Fox, the Assistant-Com- 

 missioner, agriculture in Suffolk ' is well-nigh strangled.' ' Can economics throw 

 any light on this lamentable situation? If there is one theory which is sup- 

 posed to be more remote from fact than another, it is the theory of rent. It 

 is the fashion, even with professed economists, to regard it as unduly abstract ; 

 and, in a recent address - to a learned society connected with this Section by no 

 distant ties, the President selected the theory as a conspicuous example of older 

 formulae laid aside. The account of the theory given in that address is open to 

 question, but the ground of rejection is worthy of note. Lord Farrer, it would 

 .seem, condemns the theorj- because it is a ' formula useless for practical purposes.' 

 This criticism raises the question we are now considering; for we are trying to 

 ascertain the guidance which economic science can furnish in practical affairs. 

 That it has an important, and, indeed, a necessary, relation to practice we have 

 asserted in positive terms ; but the relation is not, as we think, that which Lord 

 Farrer apparently assumes. For economics does not furnish precepts or formulse 

 immediately applicable to practice ; but it supplies systematised knowledge, the 

 possession and employment of which will afford assistance in the direction of 

 practical affairs. The theory of rent is not, then, a maxim of conduct but a 

 rational explanation of fact. Conceived thus, in my own experience as College 

 Treasurer, I have been struck by its pertinence, not its inadequacy. It has 

 certainly seemed to me that, on a broad view, the tenant considers the rent to be 

 properly that which is left when, on an average of years, he has reaped a fair profit 

 and paid his labourers the wages they command. The landlord, so far as I have 

 been able to discover, occupies in his eyes the position — to use language differently 

 applied ^ by General Walker — of a ' residual claimant' ; and such, also, as I read 

 the theory, is the place which he fills therein. 



Nor is it difficult to interpret part of the present depression in conformity with 

 the theory of rent. I must take leave to dissent from Lord Farrer when he asserts 

 that the formula, even in its older shape, paid no regard to situation or to means 

 of transuort ; and I am disposed to affirm that the emended statement of recent 

 text-hooks, in which these considerations, with others mentioned by Lord Farrer, 

 receive explicit recognition, is not so mucli a departure from the older form as a 

 development and extension of it. But, taking the two points of fertility and 

 situation alone, it is the agreement, and not the conflict, of what has happened with 

 what the theory might have led us to expect that is likely to impress. It can 

 hardly be doubted that one of the most remarkable changes of recent years has 

 been the development of the means and reduction of the cost of transportation. 

 This change implies a loss of the advantage derived from proximity to the market in 

 the case of commodities which admit of conveyance from a distance. Interpreted in 

 the language of the theory of rent, English land, as respects certain products, has 

 forfeited part of the natural protection afforded by its situation near to the market. 

 With the partial loss of this advantage has also disappeared part of another, for 

 the diminution in the cost of transportation has opened European markets to the 

 virgin soils of America and other countries ; and, with regard to products which 

 admit of convej-ance from a distance, the fertility of English land, whether it be 

 due to the skill of generations of comparatively high farming or to natural qualities 

 of soil, has lost part of its advantage. In the language of the theory of rent, the 

 forfeiture of these two advantages involves depression in the sense of a decrease 

 of rental ; and, as it seems to me, the adequacy rather than deficiency of the 

 theory is evident as a rational explanation of fact. 



Nor is it useless for practical guidance. The fact which it establishes is a 



' Cf. Report, p. 82. 



2 Cf. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. Ivii. Part IV., December 1894, 

 pp 595, &c. 



' I.e., to the wage-earner. Cf. Political Economy, by F. A. Walker, Part IV. 



