[1186] Did space permit, this would be the place to refer to the latest glorification of the doctrine of rent, which is to be found in Clark’s Distribution of Wealth, published in 1899. In that work, upon the strength of which the author enjoys a well-deserved reputation, revenues of various kinds are successively treated as rents. Imagine a fixed amount of capital applied along with successive doses of labour: each new dose of labour will produce less than the preceding one, while the production of the last dose regulates the remuneration of all the rest. But the product of the preceding doses is greater than that of the last, and a surplus value will be produced which will represent the product of capital and which will be exactly analogous to rent. Or suppose, on the other hand, that the quantity of labour is fixed and applied along with successive doses of capital; the productivity of the latter will in this case go on decreasing, and since the revenue of each dose will be proportionate to its productivity, any surplus left over will be of the nature of rent due to labour. There are other ingenious discussions which cannot be referred to in a note of this kind. But in our opinion the theory of economic equilibrium affords a simpler explanation of distribution, and the kind of optimism to which Clark’s theory gives rise seems hardly justified. His attempt to combine the idea of marginal productivity with the law of diminishing returns is a further proof of the persistent influence exerted by Ricardian ideas upon English-speaking economists.
[1187] Proudhon, Qu’est-ce que la Propriété, p. 74.
[1188] Pollock, The Land Laws, p. 12.
[1189] Agrarian Justice opposed to Agrarian Law and Agrarian Monopoly.
[1190] The Theory of Human Progression and Natural Probability of a Reign of Justice. For further information concerning Spence, Ogilvie, Dove, Paine, etc., see Escarra’s Nationalisation du Sol et Socialisme (Paris, 1904). We have drawn upon his book for the views here put forward, the works of these writers not being easily accessible.
[1191] Justice, p. 92.
[1192] “The land is the original heritage of the whole human race,” says Mill in his Dissertations and Discussions. In the Principles, Book II, chap. 2, § 5, he expresses his views thus: “The essential principle of property being to assure to all persons what they have produced by their labour and accumulated by their abstinence, this principle cannot apply to what is not the produce of labour, the raw material of the earth.” Walras, in his Théorie de la Propriété, in the Études d’Économie sociale, p. 218, says that the land by a kind of natural right is the property of the State. Henry George, in Progress and Poverty, Book VII, chap. 1, maintains that “the equal right of all men to the use of the land is as clear as their equal right to breathe the air—it is a right proclaimed by the fact of their existence.”
[1193] Principles, Book V, chap. 2, § 5.
[1194] “This continual increase arising from the circumstances of the community and from nothing in which the landholders themselves have any peculiar share, does seem a fund no less peculiarly fitted for appropriation to the purposes of the State than the whole of the rent in a country where land has never been appropriated.” (Elements of Political Economy, chap. 4, § 5.)
[1195] Cf. supra, [chapter on Saint-Simon].