of the century, and the rents of many
Highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled
in the same time. In almost every
part of Great Britain, a pound of the best
butcher's meat is, in the present times
generally worth more than two pounds of the best
white bread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes
worth three or four pounds.
It is thus that, in the progress of improvement,
the rent and profit of unimproved pasture
come to be regulated in some measure by
the rent and profit of what is improved, and
these again by the rent and profit of corn.
Corn is an annual crop; butcher's meat, a crop
which requires four or five years to grow. As
an acre of land, therefore, will produce a much
smaller quantity of the one species of food
than of the other, the inferiority of the
quantity must be compensated by the superiority
of the price. If it was more than compensated,
more corn-land would be turned into
pasture; and if it was not compensated, part
of what was in pasture would be brought back
into corn.
This equality, however, between the rent
and profit of grass and those of corn; of the
land of which the immediate produce is food
for cattle, and of that of which the immediate
produce is food for men, must be understood
to take place only through the greater part of
the improved lands of a great country. In
some particular local situations it is quite
otherwise, and the rent and profit of grass are
much superior to what can be made by corn.
Thus, in the neighbourhood of a great town,
the demand for milk, and for forage to horses,
frequently contribute, together with the high
price of butcher's meat, to raise the value of
grass above what may be called its natural
proportion to that of corn. This local advantage,
it is evident, cannot be communicated to
the lands at a distance.
Particular circumstances have sometimes
rendered some countries so populous, that the
whole territory, like the lands in the neighbourhood
of a great town, has not been sufficient
to produce both the grass and the corn
necessary for the subsistence of their inhabitants.
Their lands, therefore, have been principally
employed in the production of grass,
the more bulky commodity, and which cannot
be so easily brought from a great distance;
and corn, the food of the great body of the
people, has been chiefly imported from foreign
countries. Holland is at present in this
situation; and a considerable part of ancient
Italy seems to have been so during the prosperity
of the Romans. To feed well, old Cato
said, as we are told by Cicero, was the first
and most profitable thing in the management
of a private estate; to feed tolerably well, the
second; and to feed ill, the third. To plough,
he ranked only in the fourth place of profit
and advantage. Tillage, indeed, in that part
of ancient Italy which lay in the neighbourhood
of Rome, must have been very much
discouraged by the distributions of corn which
were frequently made to the people, either
gratuitously, or at a very low price. This
corn was brought from the conquered provinces,
of which several, instead of taxes, were
obliged to furnish a tenth part of their produce
at a stated price, about sixpence a-peck,
to the republic. The low price at which this
corn was distributed to the people, must
necessarily have sunk the price of what could be
brought to the Roman market from Latium,
or the ancient territory of Rome, and must
have discouraged its cultivation in that country.
In an open country, too, of which the principal
produce is corn, a well-inclosed piece of
grass will frequently rent higher than any
corn field in its neighbourhood. It is convenient
for the maintenance of the cattle employed
in the cultivation of the corn; and its
high rent is, in this case, not so properly paid
from the value of its own produce, as from
that of the corn lands which are cultivated by
means of it. It is likely to fall, if ever the
neighbouring lands are completely inclosed.
The present high rent of inclosed land in
Scotland seems owing to the scarcity of
inclosure, and will probably last no longer than
that scarcity. The advantage of inclosure is
greater for pasture than for corn. It saves
the labour of guarding the cattle, which feed
better, too, when they are not liable to be
disturbed by their keeper or his dog.
But where these is no local advantage of
this kind, the rent and profit of corn, or
whatever else is the common vegetable food of the
people, must naturally regulate upon the land
which is fit for producing it, the rent and
profit of pasture.
The use of the artificial grasses, of turnips,
carrots, cabbages, and the other expedients
which have been fallen upon to make an equal
quantity of land feed a greater number of
cattle than when in natural grass, should
somewhat reduce, it might be expected, the
superiority which, in an improved country,
the price of butcher's meat naturally has over
that of bread. It seems accordingly to have
done so, and there is some reason for believing
that, at least in the London market, the
price of butcher's meat, in proportion to the
price of bread, is a good deal lower in the
present times than it was in the beginning
of the last century.
In the Appendix to the life of Prince Henry,
Doctor Birch has given us an account of
the prices of butcher's meat as commonly paid
by that prince. It is there said, that the four
quarters of an ox, weighing six hundred
pounds, usually cost him nine pounds ten
shillings, or thereabouts; that is thirty-one
shillings and eight-pence per hundred pounds
weight. Prince Henry died on the 6th of
November 1612, in the nineteenth year of his age.