Improvements in milling,[157-4] and in the instruments of transportation[157-5] adapted to agricultural products, and the introduction of cheaper[157-6] food, have the same effect as improvements of agricultural production. All such steps in advance render an increase in population, or in the nation's resources, possible without any corresponding increase in the amount paid to landowners as tribute money.[157-7]
The foregoing facts furnish us the data necessary to decide what influence permanent soil improvements have on the rent of land.[157-8] The improved parcels of land now grow more fertile. Their rentability also increases, while that of the others becomes not only relatively but absolutely less, if the demand remains unaltered. The whole is as if capital had been transformed into fertile land, and this added to the improved land.
[157-1] Since it has seemed absurd to many writers to say that an improvement in the art of agriculture may cause rents to decline (compare Malthus, Principles, I, ch. 3, 8), John Stuart Mill, Principles, IV, ch. 3, § 4, prefers to put the question thus: whether the landowner is not injured by the improvement of the estates of other people, although his own is included in the improvement. Compare Davenant, Works, I, 361. And so the long agricultural crisis through which Germany passed at the beginning of the third decade of this century was produced mainly by the great impulse given to agriculture (Thaer, Schuerz etc.), while population did not keep pace with it. Similarly, at the same time, in England, McCulloch, Stat., I, 557 ff. Of course, the less fertile pieces of land declined even relatively most in price. From 1654 to 1663, Switzerland experienced a severe agricultural crisis, attended with oppressive cheapness of corn, a great decline in the price of land, innumerable cases of insolvency, revolts of the peasantry, emigration, etc. (Meyer von Knonau, Handbuch d. schweiz. Gesch., II, 43.) The Swiss had, precisely during the Thirty Years' War which spared them, so extensively developed their agricultural interests, that now that other countries began to compete with them, they could not find a market large enough for their products. For English instances of similar "agricultural distress" in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Child, Discourse on Trade, 73, 124 seq.; Temple, Observations upon the U. P., ch. 6; Tooke, History of Prices, I, 23 seq., 42. Even where there have been no technic improvements, a series of unusually good harvests may have the same results, of which there are many instances scattered through Tooke's first volume.
There is great importance attached in England to the difference between those agricultural reforms which save land and those which effect a saving in capital and labor. The latter, it is said, decrease the money rent of the landowner by depreciating the price of corn, but leave the corn-rent unaltered. The former, on the other hand, decrease the rent both in money and corn, but the money rent in a higher degree. (Ricardo, Principles, ch. 2; J. S. Mill, Principles, IV, ch. 3, 4.)
[157-2] When the demand for products of the soil which minister to luxury, such as fat meat, milk, vegetables, is increasing, a greater cheapness of the necessary wheat may raise rent, for the reason that lands are now cultivated which were not formerly tillable. Thus, there is now land in Lancashire which could not formerly be planted with corn, because the laborers would have consumed more than the harvest yielded. Since the large imports of the means of subsistence from Ireland these lands have been transformed into artificial meadows, gardens, etc. (Torrens, The Budget, 180 ff.) Compare Adam Smith, I, 257, ed. Bas. Banfield would misuse these facts to overturn the theory of Ricardo. (Organization of Industry, 1848, 49 ff.)
[157-3] The French testamentary tax was on an amount,
| moveable property | immoveable. | |||
| In 1835, of | 552 | mill. francs and | 984 | mill. |
| In 1853, of | 820 | " | 1,176 | " |
| In 1860, of | 1,179 | " | 1,545 | " |
so that the preponderance of immoveable property constituted a converging series of 78, 43, and 31 per cent. (Parieu.) In North America, with its great unoccupied territory, the reverse is the case. The census of 1850 gave a moveable property of 36 per cent.; that of 1860 of only 30 per cent. According to Dubost, the rent of land in Algeria was 80 per cent., a gross product of only 10-15 francs per hectare; in Corsica, 66 per cent., a gross yield of from 30-35 per cent.; in the Department du Nord, 17.5-24 per cent., a gross yield of from 500-740 francs. (Journal des Economistes, Juin, 1870, 336 ff.)
[157-4] The repeated sifting of the bran (mouture économique) had great influence in this respect. In France, in the sixteenth century, a setier of wheat gave only 144 pounds of bread. In 1767, according to Malouin, L'Art du Bonlanger, it gave 192 pounds. It now gives from 223 to 240 pounds. The gain in barley is still greater; the setier gives 115 pounds of flour, formerly only 58. (Roquefort, Histoire de la Vie Privée des Français, I, 72 ff. Beckmann, Beitr. zur Gesch. der Erfind., II, 54.)
[157-5] In the beginning of the eighteenth century, the counties in the neighborhood of London addressed a petition to Parliament against the extension of the building of turnpike roads which caused their rents to decline, from the competition of distant districts. (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nat., I, ch. 11, 1.) Compare Sir J. Stewart, Principles, I, ch. 10. Improvements in transportation which affect the longest and shortest roads to a market in an absolutely equal degree, as, for instance, the bridging of a river very near the market, leave rent unaffected. (von Mangoldt, V. W. L., 480.)