An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and on the Sources of Taxation

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Murray, 1831 - Business & Economics - 49 pages

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Page 192 - ... no demand for any additional quantity of corn ; the capital and labour employed on No. 3 will be devoted to the production of other commodities desirable to the community, and can have no effect in raising rent, unless the raw material from which they are made cannot be obtained without employing capital less advantageously on the land, in which case No. 3 must again be cultivated.
Page 128 - The causes of this peculiarity we shall have hereafter to point out. The consequence is, that unless some external cause, quite independent of their will, forces such peasant cultivators to slacken their rate of increase, they will, in a limited territory, whatever be the form of their rents, very rapidly approach a state of want and penury, and will be stopped at last only by the physical impossibility of procuring subsistence.
Page 299 - The honesty of the labourers, their self-respect, their value for their character as workmen, all hope of bettering their condition in life by good conduct, industry, and prudence ; their sense of their mutual duties and claims as parents and children, — all feelings and habits, in short, that contribute to make men good citizens and good men, have been undermined and impaired, or utterly destroyed.
Page 133 - But the cottier, merely as such, the Irish cottier for instance, has no such hold on the sympathies of his landlord ; and there can be no question that, of the various classes of peasant tenantry, they stand the most thoroughly desolate and alone in the time of calamity ; that they have the least protection from the ordinary effects of disastrous reverses, or of the failure of their scanty resources from any other causes. Such are the disadvantages of this the least extensive system of peasant rents....
Page 185 - If, then, good land existed in a quantity much more abundant than the production of food for an increasing population required, or if capital could be indefinitely employed without a diminished return on the old land, there could be no rise of rent ; for rent invariably proceeds from the employment of an additional quantity of labour with a proportionally less return.
Page 136 - ... of the cultivators. It is obviously the interest of the landlord of cottier, as of other peasant tenants, that an increase of his rents should always originate in the prosperity of cultivation, not in pressure on the tenants. The power of increase from the last source is very limited : from improvement, indefinite. It is clearly too the interest of the landlord, that the cottier tenantry should be replaced by capitalists, capable of pushing cultivation to the full extent to which...
Page 286 - It follows then, that the interest of the landlord is always opposed to the interest of every other class in the community. His situation is never so prosperous, as when food is scarce and dear: whereas, all other persons are greatly benefited by procuring food cheap.
Page 125 - ... as in the case of serf rents, or a definite proportion of the produce, as in the case of metayer or ryot rents. He is bound, whatever the quantity or value of his produce may be, to pay a fixed sum of money to the proprietor. This is a change most difficult to introduce, and very important when introduced. Money payments from the occupiers, are by no means essential, we must recollect, to the rise or progress of rents. Over by far the greater part of the globe such payments have never yet been...
Page 251 - ... the prices of corn and labour should be 10, 20, or 30 per cent. higher in one country than another. Under the circumstances supposed, such a difference of prices is the natural order of things, and the exchange can only be at par, when a sufficient quantity of money is introduced...
Page 322 - Zamoyski has lately established a porter brewery in Galitzia, in the hope of checking eventually so hurtful a habit, by the substitution of that wholesome beverage. The first time I saw any of these withered creatures, was at Dantzic. I was prepared, by printed accounts, to expect a sight of singular wretchedness ; but I shrunk involuntarily from the contemplation of the reality ; and my feelings could not be consoled by the instantaneous and inevitable reflection, that I was then in a region which...

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