Taxation as affecting the Agricultural Interest. 391 = 125 
mitting that the workers here included are not all heads of 
families, and recalling other qualifying considerations which 
suggest themselves, there would appear to be good ground for 
reckoning on an average of two dependent individuals for every 
one more or less directly engaged in agriculture. This would 
raise the numbers directly interested in all that concerns the 
land and its cultivation to between eight and nine million 
persons of all ages, a total that represents more than a fourth 
of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. 
The next point to be determined is the capital possessed by Property of th 
the agricultural classes, and the income derived by them from ap'oultural 
its profitable use. In the widest sense of the term this capital 
will include not only the value of the soil itself, the outlay in 
landlord's improvements, and the tenant-farmer's investment for 
the purpose of his business, but it will cover also the less pal- 
pable but not less needful factors of the brain-power devoted to 
the task of cultivation, and the energy of muscle and sinew pro- 
vided for the manual labour of the farm. To the three former 
elements alone a direct money-value may be given. From the 
combined employment of all five constituents income is returned 
and distributed to the several classes concerned, in the form of 
rent, interest, profits, or wages. 
The landlords' share of this income, as measured by the gross Landowners' 
rental yearly assessed for income-tax in the United Kingdom, is '^^V^^^^ ^"^^ »i 
67,000,000/. Of this sum it is to be noted that about 5,000,000Z. 
represents the fixed and separate, but equally landed, revenues 
of the lay and clerical titheowners. Some three-fourths of the 
rest, or 46,000,000/., may be most properly regarded as land- 
lords' rent in its more primary sense, and 16,000,000/. as the 
interest of sums laid out in fitting the soil for profitable culti- 
vation, by means of enclosure, buildings, drainage, and so forth. 
The extent of these investments goes some way to account for 
he recent rise in the nominal rental of land, and it is too often 
overlooked when proposals are made to subject land, as a source 
)i wholly unearned revenue, to exceptionally heavy taxes. 
Taking the natural rent at 30 years' purchase, and the landlords' 
nvestments and titheowners' property at 25, these figures would 
ippear to indicate the existence of a titheowners' capital of 
125,000,000/., an ordinary landlords' capital of 1,380,000,000/. 
n the soil itself, and of 400,000,000/. in its improvements, or, 
n the aggregate, 1,905,000,000/. Throughout this Paper the 
ithe-rent charge is included in the term " land," and fully 
ihares its taxation. The payment of tithes by the occupier is 
lot properly a tax, but a simple rendering of rent to the tithe- 
owner, who, since the days of King Ethelvvolph, the first 
lereditary monarch of the English Saxons, has, in one form or 
