Ricardo, and after him Mill, M'Culloch, and others, are of opinionthat rent is paid on account of the natural productive fertilityinherent in the land itself.Ricardo has based a whole system onthis notion.If he had made an excursion to Canada, he would havebeen able to make observations there in every valley, on everyhill, which would have convinced him that his theory is based onsand.As he, however, only took into account the circumstances ofEngland, he fell into the erroneous idea that these English fieldsand meadows for whose pretended natural productive capability suchhandsome rents are now paid, have at all times been the same fieldsand meadows.The original natural productive capability of land isevidently so unimportant, and affords to the person using it sosmall an excess of products, that the rent derivable from it aloneis not worth mentioning.All Canada in its original state(inhabited merely by hunters) would yield in meat and skinsscarcely enough income to pay the salary of a single Oxonianprofessor of political economy.The natural productive capabilityof the soil in Malta consists of rocks, which would scarcely haveyielded a rent at any time.If we follow up with the mind's eye thecourse of the civilisation of whole nations, and of theirconversion from the condition of hunters to the pastoral condition,and from this to that of agriculturists, &c., we may easilyconvince ourselves that the rent everywhere was originally nil, andthat it rose everywhere with the progress of civilisation, ofpopulation, and with the increase of mental and material capital.
By comparing the mere agricultural nation with the agricultural,manufacturing, and commercial nation, it will be seen that in thelatter twenty times more people live on rents than in the former.
According to Marshal's statistics of Great britain, for example, inEngland and Scotland 16,537,398 human beings were living in 1831,among whom were 1,116,398 rentiers.We could scarcely find inPoland on an equal space of land the twentieth part of this number.
If we descend from generals to particulars and investigate theorigin and cause of the rental of separate estates, we findeverywhere that it is the result of a productive capability whichhas been bestowed on it not spontaneously by nature, but chiefly(directly or indirectly) through the mental and material labour andcapital employed thereon and through the development of society.Wesee, indeed, how pieces of land yield rents which the hand of menhas never stirred by cultivation, as, for instance, quarries, sandpits, pasture grounds; but this rent is merely the effect of theincrease of culture, capital, and population in the vicinity.Wesee, on the other hand, that those pieces of land bring most rentwhose natural productive capability has been totally destroyed, andwhich serve for no other use than for men to eat and drink, sit,sleep, or walk, work, or enjoy themselves, teach or be taught upon,viz.building sites.
The basis of rent is the exclusive benefit or advantage whichthe ground yields to that individual at whose exclusive disposal itis placed, and the greatness of this benefit is determinedespecially according to the amount of available mental and materialcapital in the community in which he is placed, and also accordingto the opportunity which the special situation and peculiarcharacter of the property and the utilisation of capital previouslyinvested therein affords to the person exclusively possessing theproperty for obtaining material values, or for satisfying mentaland bodily requirements and enjoyments.
Rent is the interest of a capital which is fixed to a naturalfund, or which is a capitalised natural fund.The territory,however, of that nation which has merely capitalised the naturalfunds devoted to agriculture, and which does so in that imperfectmanner which is the case in mere agriculture, yields incomparablyless rent than the territory of that nation which combinesagricultural and manufacturing industry on its territory.Therentiers of such a country live mostly in the same nation whichsupplies the manufactured goods.But when the nation which is faradvanced in agriculture and population establishes a manufacturingindustry of its own, it capitalises (as we have already proved ina former chapter) not merely those powers of nature which arespecially serviceable for manufactures and were hithertounemployed, but also the greatest part of the manufacturing powersserving for agriculture.The increase of rent in such a nation,therefore, infinitely exceeds the interest of the material capitalrequired to develop the manufacturing power.
NOTES:
1.General Statistics of the British Empire London, 1836.
