pay the ordinary profit to the farmer or the
owner of the herd or flock, but to afford some
small rent to the landlord. The rent increases
in proportion to the goodness of the pasture.
The same extent of ground not only maintains
a greater number of cattle, but as they
are brought within a smaller compass, less labour
becomes requisite to tend them, and to
collect their produce. The landlord gains
both ways; by the increase of the produce,
and by the diminution of the labour which
must be maintained out of it.
The rent of land not only varies with its
fertility, whatever be its produce, but with its
situation, whatever be its fertility. Land in
the neighbourhood of a town gives a greater
rent than land equally fertile in a distant part
of the country. Though it may cost no more
labour to cultivate the one than the other, it
must always cost more to bring the produce
of the distant land to market. A greater
quantity of labour, therefore, must be maintained
out of it; and the surplus, from which
are drawn both the profit of the farmer and
the rent of the landlord, must be diminished.
But in remote parts of the country, the rate
of profit, as has already been shewn, is generally
higher than in the neighbourhood of a
large town. A smaller proportion of this diminished
surplus, therefore, must belong to
the landlord.
Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers,
by diminishing the expense of carriage, put
the remote parts of the country more nearly
upon a level with those in the neighbourhood
of the town. They are upon that account the
greatest of all improvements. They encourage
the cultivation of the remote, which must
always be the most extensive circle of the
country. They are advantageous to the town
by breaking down the monopoly of the country
in its neighbourhood. They are advantageous
even to that part of the country.
Though they introduce some rival commodities
into the old market, they open many new
markets to its produce. Monopoly, besides,
is a great enemy to good management, which
can never be universally established, but in
consequence of that free and universal competition
which forces every body to have recourse
to it for the sake of self-defence. It
is not more than fifty years ago, that some of
the counties in the neighbourhood of London
petitioned the parliament against the extension
of the turnpike roads into the remoter
counties. Those remoter counties, they pretended,
from the cheapness of labour, would
be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in
the London market than themselves, and would
thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their cultivation.
Their rents, however, have risen,
and their cultivation has been improved since
that time.
A corn field of moderate fertility produces
a much greater quantity of food for man, than
the best pasture of equal extent. Though its
cultivation requires much more labour, yet the
surplus which remains after replacing the seed
and maintaining all that labour, is likewise
much greater. If a pound of butcher's meat,
therefore, was never supposed to be worth more
than a pound of bread, this greater surplus
would everywhere be of greater value and
constitute a greater fund, both for the profit
of the farmer and the rent of the landlord. It
seems to have done so universally in the rude
beginnings of agriculture.
But the relative values of those two different
species of food, bread and butcher's meat,
are very different in the different periods of
agriculture. In its rude beginnings, the unimproved
wilds, which then occupy the far
greater part of the country, are all abandoned
to cattle. There is more butcher's meat than
bread; and bread, therefore, is the food for
which there is the greatest competition, and
and which consequently brings the greatest price.
At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four
reals, one-and-twenty pence halfpenny sterling,
was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price
of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three
hundred. He says nothing of the price of
bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable
about it. An ox there, he says,
costs little more than the labour of catching
him. But corn can nowhere be raised without
a great deal of labour; and in a country
which lies upon the river Plate, at that time
the direct road from Europe to the silver
mines of Potosi, the money-price of labour
could be very cheap. It is otherwise when
cultivation is extended over the greater part
of the country. There is then more bread than
butcher's meat. The competition changes its
direction, and the price of butcher's meat becomes
greater than the price of bread.
By the extension, besides, of cultivation,
the unimproved wilds become insufficient to
supply the demand for butcher's meat. A
great part of the cultivated lands must be employed
in rearing and fattening cattle; of which
the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay,
not only the labour necessary for tending them,
but the rent, which the landlord, and the profit
which the farmer, could have drawn from
such land employed in tillage. The cattle
bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when
brought to the same market, are, in proportion
to their weight or goodness, sold at the
same price as these which are reared upon the
most improved land. The proprietors of those
moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their
land in proportion to the price of their cattle.
It is not more than a century ago, that in
many parts of the Highlands of Scotland,
butcher's meat was as cheap or cheaper than
even bread made of oatmeal. The Union
opened the market of England to the Highland
cattle. Their ordinary price, at present,
is about three times greater than at the beginning