An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📖

pay

somewhat more, or to content himself with somewhat less, than the ordinary

profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This portion, however, may

still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent at which it is

naturally meant that land should, for the most part, be let.

 

The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable

profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its

improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions ;

for it can scarce ever be more than partly the case. The landlord demands a

rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the

expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those

improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but

sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed,

however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if

they had been all made by his own.

 

He sometimes demands rent for what is altogether incapable of human

improvements. Kelp is a species of sea-weed, which, when burnt, yields an

alkaline salt, useful for making glass, soap, and for several other

purposes. It grows in several parts of Great Britain, particularly in

Scotland, upon such rocks only as lie within the high-water mark, which are

twice every day covered with the sea, and of which the produce, therefore,

was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate

is bounded by a kelp shore of this kind, demands a rent for it as much as

for his corn-fields.

 

The sea in the neighbourhood of the islands of Shetland is more than

commonly abundant in fish, which makes a great part of the subsistence of

their inhabitants. But, in order to profit by the produce of the water, they

must have a habitation upon the neighbouring land. The rent of the landlord

is in proportion, not to what the farmer can make by the land, but to what

he can make both by the land and the water. It is partly paid in sea-fish;

and one of the very few instances in which rent makes a part of the price of

that commodity, is to be found in that country.

 

The rent of land, therefore, considered as the price paid for the use of the

land, is naturally a monopoly price. It is not at all proportioned to what

the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land, or to what

he can afford to take, but to what the farmer can afford to give.

 

Such parts only of the produce of land can commonly be brought to market, of

which the ordinary price is sufficient to replace the stock which must be

employed in bringing them thither, together with its ordinary profits. If

the ordinary price is more than this, the surplus part of it will naturally

go to the rent of the land. If it is not more, though the commodity may be

brought to market, it can afford no rent to the landlord. Whether the price

is, or is not more, depends upon the demand.

 

There are some parts of the produce of land, for which the demand must

always be such as to afford a greater price than what is sufficient to bring

them to market; and there are others for which it either may or may not be

such as to afford this greater price. The former must always afford a rent

to the landlord. The latter sometimes may and sometimes may not, according

to different circumstances.

 

Rent, it is to be observed, therefore, enters into the composition of the

price of commodities in a different way from wages and profit. High or low

wages and profit are the causes of high or low price ; high or low rent is

the effect of it. It is because high or low wages and profit must be paid,

in order to bring a particular commodity to market, that its price is high

or low. But it is because its price is high or low, a great deal more, or

very little more, or no more, than what is sufficient to pay those wages and

profit, that it affords a high rent, or a low rent, or no rent at all.

 

The particular consideration, first, of those parts of the produce of land

which always afford some rent ; secondly, of those which sometimes may and

sometimes may not afford rent ; and, thirdly, of the variations which, in

the different periods of improvement, naturally take place in the relative

value of those two different sorts of rude produce, when compared both with

one another and with manufactured commodities, will divide this chapter into

three parts.

 

PART I. - Of the Produce of Land which always affords Rent.

 

As men, like all other animals, naturally multiply in proportion to the

means of their subsistence, food is always more or less in demand. It can

always purchase or command a greater or smaller quantity of labour, and

somebody can always be found who is willing to do something in order to

obtain it. The quantity of labour, indeed, which it can purchase, is not

always equal to what it could maintain, if managed in the most economical

manner, on account of the high wages which are sometimes given to labour ;

but it can always purchase such a quantity of labour as it can maintain,

according to the rate at which that sort of labour is commonly maintained in

the neighbourhood.

 

But land, in almost any situation, produces a greater quantity of food than

what is sufficient to maintain all the labour necessary for bringing it to

market, in the most liberal way in which that labour is ever maintained. The

surplus, too, is always more than sufficient to replace the stock which

employed that labour, together with its profits. Something, therefore,

always remains for a rent to the landlord.

 

The most desert moors in Norway and Scotland produce some sort of pasture

for cattle, of which the milk and the increase are always more than

sufficient, not only to maintain all the labour necessary for tending them,

and to pay the ordinary profit to the farmer or the owner of the herd or

flock, but to afford some small rent to the landlord. The rent increases in

proportion to the goodness of the pasture. The same extent of ground not

only maintains a greater number of cattle, but as they we brought within a

smaller compass, less labour becomes requisite to tend them, and to collect

their produce. The landlord gains both ways; by the increase of the produce,

and by the diminution of the labour which must be maintained out of it.

 

The rent of land not only varies with its fertility, whatever be its

produce, but with its situation, whatever be its fertility. Land in the

neighbourhood of a town gives a greater rent than land equally fertile in a

distant part of the country. Though it may cost no more labour to cultivate

the one than the other, it must always cost more to bring the produce of the

distant land to market. A greater quantity of labour, therefore, must be

maintained out of it; and the surplus, from which are drawn both the profit

of the farmer and the rent of the landlord, must be diminished. But in

remote parts of the country, the rate of profit, as has already been shewn,

is generally higher than in the neighbourhood of a large town. A smaller

proportion of this diminished surplus, therefore, must belong to the

landlord.

 

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of

carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with

those in the neighbourhood of the town. They are upon that account the

greatest of all improvements. They encourage the cultivation of the remote,

which must always be the most extensive circle of the country. They are

advantageous to the town by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its

neighbourhood. They are advantageous even to that part of the country.

Though they introduce some rival commodities into the old market, they open

many new markets to its produce. Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good

management, which can never be universally established, but in consequence

of that free and universal competition which forces every body to have

recourse to it for the sake of self defence. It is not more than fifty years

ago, that some of the counties in the neighbourhood of London petitioned the

parliament against the extension of the turnpike roads into the remoter

counties. Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness of

labour, would be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in the London

market than themselves, and would thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their

cultivation. Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has

been improved since that time.

 

A corn field of moderate fertility produces a much greater quantity of food

for man, than the best pasture of equal extent. Though its cultivation

requires much more labour, yet the surplus which remains after replacing the

seed and maintaining all that labour, is likewise much greater. If a pound

of butcher’s meat, therefore, was never supposed to be worth more than a

pound of bread, this greater surplus would everywhere be of greater value

and constitute a greater fund, both for the profit of the farmer and the

rent of the landlord. It seems to have done so universally in the rude

beginnings of agriculture.

 

But the relative values of those two different species of food, bread and

butcher’s meat, are very different in the different periods of agriculture.

In its rude beginnings, the unimproved wilds, which then occupy the far

greater part of the country, are all abandoned to cattle. There is more

butcher’s meat than bread; and bread, therefore, is the food for which there

is the greatest competition, and which consequently brings the greatest

price. At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty

pence halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price

of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. He says nothing of the

price of bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable about it. An ox

there, he says, costs little more than the labour of catching him. But corn

can nowhere be raised without a great deal of labour ; and in a country

which lies upon the river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to

the silver mines of Potosi, the money-price of labour could be very cheap.

It is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of the

country. There is then more bread than butcher’s meat. The competition

changes its direction, and the price of butcher’s meat becomes greater

than the price of bread.

 

By the extension, besides, of cultivation, the unimproved wilds become

insufficient to supply the demand for butcher’s meat. A great part of the

cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and fattening cattle ; of which

the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour

necessary for tending them, but the rent which the landlord, and the profit

which the farmer, could have drawn from such land employed in tillage. The

cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same

market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the same

price as those which are reared upon the most improved land. The proprietors

of those moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion

to the price of