Chapter XVI: Section CLIX

HISTORY OF RENT.--RENT AND THE GENERAL GOOD.

We so frequently hear rent called the result of the monopoly[159-1] of land, and an undeserved tribute paid by the whole people to landowners, that it is high time we should call attention to the common advantage it is to all. There is evidently danger that, with the rapid growth of population, the mass of mankind should yield to the temptation of gradually confining themselves to the satisfaction of coarse, palpable wants; that all refined leisure, which makes life and the troubles that attend it worth enduring, and which is the indispensable foundation of all permanent progress and all higher activity, should be gradually surrendered. (See § 145.) Here rent constitutes a species of reserve fund, which grows greater in proportion as these dangers impend by reason of the decline of wages and of the profit of capital, or interest.[159-2] Besides, precisely in times when rent is high, the sale and divisibility of landed estates act as a beneficent reaction against the monopoly of land, which is always akin to the condition of things created by rent.

But it is of immeasurably greater importance that high rents deter the people from abusing the soil in an anti-economic way; that they compel men to settle about the centers of commerce, to improve the means of transportation, and under certain circumstances to engage in the work of colonization; while, otherwise, idleness would soon reconcile itself to the heaping together of large swarms of men.[159-3] The anticipation of rent may render possible the construction of railroads, which enable the land to yield that very anticipated rent.

[Footnote 159-1: "Rent is a tax levied by the landowners as
monopolists." (_Hopkins_, Great Britain for the last forty
Years, 1834.) For a very remarkable armed and successful
resistance of farmers in the state of New York to the claims
for rent of the Rensselaer family, represented by the
government, see _Wappäus_ Nord Amerika, 734.]

[Footnote 159-2: _Malthus_, Additions to the Essay on
Population, 1817, III, ch. 10; compare also _Verri_,
Meditazioni, XXIV, 3. The Physiocrates call the landowners
_classe disponible_, since, as they may live without labor,
they are best adapted to military service, the civil
service, etc., either in person or by defraying the expenses
of those engaged in them. (_Turgot_, Sur la Formation etc.,
§ 15; Questions sur la Chine, 5.)]

[Footnote 159-3: Well discussed by _Schäffle_, Theorie, 65,
72, 83. _Malthus_ considers the capital and labor expended
in agriculture more productive than any other, because they
produce not only the usual interest and wages, but also
rent. If, therefore, the manufacturing and commercial profit
of a country = 12 per cent., and the profit of capital
employed in agriculture = 10 per cent., a corn law which
compelled the capital engaged in manufactures and commerce
to be devoted to agriculture would be productive of
advantage to the national husbandry in general, if the
increase in rent should amount to about 3 per cent. (On the
Effects of the Corn Laws and of a Rise or Fall in the Price
of Corn on the Agriculture and the general Wealth of the
Country, 1815. The Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of
Restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn, 1815.) Compare
_supra_, § 55, and the detailed rectification in _Roscher_,
Nationalökonomik des Ackerbaues, etc., § 159 ff.]

CHAPTER III.

WAGES.