to the landlord; and since, if he did not so pay it, he would receive more than the ordinary rate of profit, the competition of other capitalists, that competition which equalizes the profits of different capitals, will enable the landlord to appropriate it. The rent, therefore, which any land will yield, is the excess of its produce, beyond what would be returned to the same capital if employed on the worst land in cultivation.
It has been denied that there can be any land in cultivation which pays no rent, because landlords (it is contended) would not allow their land to be occupied without payment. [pg 236] Inferior land, however, does not usually occupy, without interruption, many square miles of ground; it is dispersed here and there, with patches of better land intermixed, and the same person who rents the better land obtains along with it the inferior soils which alternate with it. He pays a rent, nominally for the whole farm, but calculated on the produce of those parts alone (however small a portion of the whole) which are capable of returning more than the common rate of profit. It is thus scientifically true that the remaining parts pay no rent.
§ 4. —Or to the Capital employed in the least advantageous Circumstances.
Let us, however, suppose that there were a validity in this objection, which can by no means be conceded to it; that, when the demand of the community had forced up food to such a price as would remunerate the expense of producing it from a certain quality of soil, it happened nevertheless [pg 237] that all the soil of that quality was withheld from cultivation, the increase of produce, which the wants of society required, would for the time be obtained wholly (as it always is partially), not by an extension of cultivation, but by an increased application of labor and capital to land already cultivated.
Now we have already seen that this increased application of capital, other things being unaltered, is always