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CHAP. VII. SECT. I.

Farmers' Rents. Introduction.

Book I.

Chap. vii.

Sect. 1.

Farmers'

THE rents we are about to examine, offer at first sight, it must be confessed, a less attractive field of investigation than those which we have left. We have no longer to consider rents as mainly Rents. determining by their forms and their results the destinies of nations. Those now before us can only exist when the most important relations of the different classes of society have ceased to originate in the ownership and occupation of the soil. When a race of capitalists have made their appearance, to take charge of the varied industry of a population, and advance from their own funds the wages of its labor, property in land, and the forms of tenancy it may give birth to, no longer influence in the first degree, either the springs of government, or the constituent elements of society. The composition of the community becomes more complicated, other interests and other sources of power mingle their forces to determine the character and condition of a people, and affect the detail of all their multiplied connexions. Even in this state of things, however, that cannot be other than an important attempt, which seeks to discover the manner in which the revenues of the landed class swell and enlarge themselves with the progress of the community, so as to preserve some proportion with the growing wealth of the body of the people.

BOOK I. Chap. vii.

Sect. 1.

Farmers'
Rents.

But the examination of the various causes which affect the progress of rents at this more advanced period of a people's existence, is not merely interesting in itself. In the present peculiar state of public opinion on these subjects, such an examination can hardly fail to throw a useful light on other divisions of the subject of the "distribution of the national wealth." It will disencumber, for instance, of many false facts and erroneous opinions, our future examination of the course of profits and wages in the more advanced stages of society. It will tend to remove a common, though strange and painful belief, as to some necessary connexion between the progress of the mass of rents and a gradual decrease in the national power of providing food for increasing numbers. It will (incidentally) help to explain the mutations which take place in the relative numbers and influence of the agricultural and non-agricultural classes. These, and similar results, which will present themselves in the course of the enquiry on which we are about to enter, will, in a degree compensate, it must be hoped, for the rather dry and abstract nature of some of the calculations and reasonings which must be employed.

Origin of Farmers' Rents.

That system of cultivation by peasants, which we have been examining, and the various relations between the landlords and the husbandmen to which it gives birth, have been succeeded on particular spots of the globe, slowly and partially, by a dif

ferent mode of managing agriculture, and the effect of this change on rents we have now to trace.

After a certain progress in civilization and wealth, the wages of the laboring class consist no longer of a revenue which they themselves extract from the earth; food accumulates in the hands of capitalists (or persons using their accumulated stock to make a profit from it) in sufficient quantities to enable them to advance the laborer his maintenance during the progress of his various tasks; they receive the produce of those tasks when completed, and the great essential step has then been taken, which confers on a class of men distinct from both landlords and laborers, the management of the national industry.

This change usually begins with the non-agricultural classes; it is the artizans and the handicraftsmen who first range themselves under the management of capitalists; and to this point most nations, which have any pretensions to civilization, have advanced. The case is different with the cultivators. Among some of the most polished people of the globe, and over the greater part of its surface, the agricultural laborers are themselves the managers of agriculture: their wages, as we have seen, never subsist in any other character than that of a revenue of their own, and they exert and direct their labor at their own discretion.

There are, however, districts of very small comparative extent, in which both the agricultural and other laborers are fed and employed by capitalists. These capitalists receive of course the produce of

Book I.

Chap. vii.
Sect. 1.

Farmers'

Rents.

BOOK 1. the labor they maintain, and are responsible to the
Chap. vii.
Sect. 1. owner of the soil for its stipulated rent.

Farmers'

One of the immediate consequences of this change Rents. is the power of moving at pleasure the labor and capital employed in agriculture, to other occupations. While the tenant was himself a laboring peasant, forced, in the absence of other funds for his maintenance, to extract it himself from the soil, he was chained to that soil by necessity; and the little stock he might possess, since it was not sufficient to procure him a maintenance unless used for the single purposes of cultivation, was virtually chained to the soil with its master. But when the employers of the laborers hold in their hands an accumulated fund equal to their support, this dependance on the soil is broken: and unless as much can be gained by employing the working class on the land, as from their exertions in various other employments, which in such a state of society abound, the business of cultivation will be abandoned.

Rent, in such a case, necessarily consists merely of surplus profits; that is, of all that can be gained by employing a certain quantity of capital and labor upon the land, more could be gained by it in any other occupation.

Severance of the Connection between Rent and

Wages.

Rents thus constituted, cease at once to decide the amount of wages. While obliged to extract his own food from the earth, the quantity of produce which the laborer retained, the amount, that

is, of his real wages, depended, we have seen, mainly Book I on the contract made with the proprietor.

Chap. vii.
Sect. 1.

Rents.

When the engagement of the laborer is with a capitalist, this dependance on the landlord is dis- Farmers' solved, and the amount of his wages is determined by other causes. These we shall hereafter trace; but the termination of the influence of rents on wages, is an era in the progress of both, too marked to be passed in silence. It is this circumstance which mainly distinguishes the agricultural laborers of England from those of the rest of the world. For if we except Holland and the Netherlands, England is the only country in which the system of rents we are about to examine, prevails exclusively, or even principally.

SECTION II.

Different Modes in which Farmers' Rents may increase.

Book I.

Chap. vii.

ect. 2.

Increase of

WHEN rents consist of surplus profits, there are three causes from which the rent of a particular spot of ground may increase, First, an increase of the produce from the accumulation of larger quan- Farmers' tities of capital in its cultivation; Secondly, the Rents. more efficient application of capital already employed; Thirdly, (the capital and produce remaining the same) the diminution of the share of the producing classes in that produce, and a corresponding increase of the share of the landlord. These causes may combine in different proportions in the aug

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