Chap. vii. facts and every day experience as this, that while Book I. rents are rising, the amount of the national produce is always stationary. Farmers' The effects on national wealth of a rise of rents Increase of from increased production, obtained by the employ- Rents. ment of additional capital, are of a widely different complexion from those exclusively contemplated by Mr. Ricardo. Let us again suppose A, B, C, D, to produce respectively £110., £115., £120., and £130., in a country in which the art of agriculture is backward and imperfect. As skill and wealth increase, let its cultivation become more and more complete, and the capital employed on these soils be doubled; and let them yield (prices remaining the same), A £ 220., B £ 230., C £ 240., D £ 260. A will still pay no rent, but there will have been a rise of rents on the other soils, amounting in the whole to £35., B will pay £ 10., C £ 20., D £ 40., and these new rents will be a clear addition to the national resources, founded on the creation of fresh wealth no class will be the poorer, nothing will have happened which is injurious to any one; there will have been no transfer of wealth; the relative value of raw produce will (for any thing involved in this change) have remained perfectly stationary: and in proportion to this addition to its former resources, will the country abound more in the "necessaries, conveniences, and enjoyments of society," and be better able to maintain fleets and armies," or make any other financial effort, than it was. The increased rent, however, will form but a part, and not the most important part, of the augmented 66 Farmers' Rents. BOOK I. wealth and additional resources, which the same Chap. vii. Sect. 2. multiplication of capital that created the rent, will produce and place in other hands than those Increase of of the landlords. In the case we have put, it will be observed, that while rents have doubled, agricultural capital, wages and profits, have doubled too. The land of the community produces twice what it did, and its territorial resources have doubled, although its frontier has not been extended; and while this process is continued and repeated, which in the progress of a skilful and wealthy people, it may be more than once, such a people will continue to multiply in numbers, in riches, and in political strength, compared with neighbouring nations, among whom a ruder and more inefficient mode of culture may continue to prevail. Increased rents, therefore, originating in the accumulation of capital on the land, and in increased production, are not only themselves a clear addition to the resources of a country, but necessarily indicate a yet greater addition in the hands of the producing classes;-an addition which is substantially equivalent to the progressive enlargement of the territory itself. There is one sense in which the proposition, that rent is no addition to the wealth and resources of a country, is a truth, though a very insignificant truth: when it is merely meant, that the produce of the land and labor of a country being determined, the appropriation of a part of it as rent, makes the nation, collectively, no richer than it was before; this certainly is a truth, or rather a Chap. vii. Increase of Rents. puerile truism. The produce of the land and labor Book I. of a country being once determined, the amount of its collective wealth cannot of course be affected by the subsequent appropriation of it; whether it be Farmers' devoted wholly to wages, to profits, or even taxes, the nation collectively is as rich and no richer than it was. But when it is asserted, as Mr. Ricardo obviously means to assert, that in the progress of society, increasing rents merely indicate a transfer of a part of the wealth already existing, and never form any real addition to the resources of a nation, the proposition is an obvious fallacy, founded on his own peculiarly imperfect view of the sources in which successive additions to the rents of a country originate. Different Effects of Capital employed in different So far we have traced the effects on rents of the accumulation of capital generally: that is, without distinguishing between the effects of the dif ferent shapes in which it may be applied to the land during the progress of its increase: and so far as the necessary effect of such an accumulation on rents was alone in question, this general view was sufficient. But to observe more distinctly the probable progress of the increase of capital employed in agriculture, and the ultimate limit to it; and to trace its effects on the interests of the community, on the relative numbers and weight of the classes which Sect. 2. Book I. compose it; and on the nature and direction of their Chap. vii. industry, we must carefully distinguish between the effects of increasing capital when it is applied to Auxiliary the support of additional labor, and when it is applied as auxiliary to the industry of the laborers already employed, without any increase in their Capital. number. I am aware that if we follow Mr. Ricardo, and some later writers, the distinction here made is fanciful. According to them, this auxiliary capital is the result of labor, and, tracing it sufficiently far back, of labor alone. Its employment, therefore, may be considered as the employment of the labor which was used to produce it: and whether a man works for ten days in producing a plough to be employed upon the soil, or works ten days upon the soil itself, he does virtually the same thing; in either case ten days labor has been employed in cultivation. There are some points of view, perhaps, in which this forced identification of the results of labor, with labor itself, may not be inadmissible, and may even be found convenient for the purposes of calculation. Mr. Ricardo, and the writers who have followed him, universally speak of the labor which a commodity has cost, as the sole foundation and measure of its value relatively to all other commodities. A quantity of corn produced by a month's labor of one man, and a plough produced by a month's labor of another man, would, according to them, be of precisely the same value. Hence all commodities must be estimated as so much accumulated labor. "Capital, or what is the Sect. 2. Capital. same thing, labor," is an expression of Mr. Ricardo's Book I. which flows naturally enough from their theory of Chap. vii. the origin and measure of value. This theory it is not necessary for our present purpose to examine. Auxiliary I beg, however, in passing, to be numbered among those who believe it defective, and who think that in comparing the exchangeable value of different commodities, other circumstances must be taken into consideration, besides the quantity of labor bestowed directly or indirectly upon each. But whether such a theory of value be sound or unsound, for the purposes of our present investigation, it will be necessary to think and speak of labor, and of the results of labor as two different things. It will hardly be denied, that the using an implement or manure to produce an effect in agriculture, or using directly on the land the labor which the implement or manure may have cost, are substantially distinct and different operations; that they may lead to different results, and each be practicable or profitable only under different circumstances. Now it is some of the effects of such differences that I am about to point out, because I think the knowledge of them will lay open important views of the present condition and possible progress of nations, and of the causes of those changes which take place gradually in the relative numbers and influence of the different bodies of men of which they are composed. The first difference which we will remark, between the application of capital to agriculture in the support of additional laborers, and in the shape of im |