REPAIR, DEPRECIATION, AND DESTRUCTION OF WEALTH: RELATION TO ITS SALE AND RENT
§ I. REPAIR OF RENT-BEARING AGENTS
The necessity of repairing nearly all economic agents
1. The continued rent of indirect agents is dependent on the continual repair of certain parts necessary for their efficiency. All earthly things wear out or decay. Whenever man's hand is withheld, nature takes possession of his work, regardless of his purposes. Dust gathers on unused clothes, and moths burrow in them. Shut up a house, and windows are shattered, roofs leak, and vermin swarm. To close a factory is to hasten the time when buildings and machinery will be piled upon the rubbish heap. The most magnificent and solid works of man have crumbled under the finger of time. The earth is strewn with ruins of gigantic engineering works, aqueducts, canals, temples, and monuments, whose restoration would be no less a task than was their first building. Everywhere vigilance and repairs are the conditions of continued uses of wealth. Some works of nature, such as waterfalls, may appear to have a continued use without repair, but they bear rent only when used with other things that must be constantly mended. A certain amount of labor on the banks of the mill-stream, and certain repairs on the dam, the water-wheel, and the gates are necessary. By a fiction in business contracts the waterfall may be dealt with apart from those conditions to its use, and may be rented, as a field is, with the agreement that the tenant keep up the repairs.
The efficiency of land as mere standing-room usually does not seem to be dependent on repairs. But here again the land yields rent in connection with other rent-bearing agents (such as houses and other agents above ground), which must be repaired. Standing-room on land is not a complete indirect agent; it is but one of the conditions for carrying on an industry, and even it often requires repairs to make it usable. Ranging from these extreme cases of stableness and durability, indirect agents vary to the extremes of fragility and ephemeralness.
The fertile lands of large regions have lost their usefulness
2. Most of the qualities that contribute to make land fertile in agriculture being destructible, the constant repair of tilled land is necessary to its continued fertility. If any things could be said to be indestructible, they would be some of the works of nature. In a sense, all matter is indestructible. Man cannot annihilate it, he can simply change its condition. But in economic discussion it is the value of things that is being considered, and from this point of view everything is in some degree destructible. The effects of bad husbandry are everywhere apparent, and in many regions fertile fields have been physically and economically destroyed. In Asia, lands that once supported millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of population are now deserts. Egypt, for a time reduced to a semi-desert condition, has only in the past century been restored to a certain extent by the use of new methods and a return to the old ones. Many of the areas that were the granaries of Rome can now hardly support a sparse, half-starving population. The lands, or at any rate, the elements that gave them value, have been destroyed.
Wearing out of some American lands
Even in young America may be seen the effect of a failure to keep land in repair. As the new rich lands of the West were opened up, the old lands in the East were allowed to wear out, and many of them were abandoned. On the new lands in turn the same methods were followed, using up the first rich store of fertility with no attempt to keep up the quality of the soil. This may have been the best policy for the time; it would not have been economical to employ Old World methods of intensive husbandry when such rich extensive areas were being opened up. But the process was one destructive of natural resources. As settlement moved westward, great forests fell in ashes, and the soil was robbed of the fertile elements which it had taken centuries for nature to store up.