rules as that of the unimproved.
In a work entitled “The Past, the Present, and the Future,” Mr. Carey takes [a] ground of objection to the Ricardo theory of rent, namely, that in point of historical fact the lands first brought under cultivation are not the most fertile, but the barren lands. “We find the settler invariably occupying the high and thin lands requiring little clearing and no drainage. With the growth of population and wealth, other soils yielding a larger return to labor are always brought into activity, with a constantly increasing return to the labor expended upon them.”
In whatever order the lands come into cultivation, those [pg 242] which when cultivated yield the least return, in proportion to the labor required for their culture, will always regulate the price of agricultural produce; and all other lands will pay a rent simply equivalent to the excess of their produce over this minimum. Whatever unguarded expressions may have been occasionally used in describing the law of rent, these two propositions are all that was ever intended by it. If, indeed, Mr. Carey could show that the return to labor from the land, agricultural skill and science being supposed the same, is not a diminishing return, he would overthrow a principle much more fundamental than any law of rent. But in this he has wholly failed.
Others, again, allege as an objection against Ricardo, that if all land were of equal fertility it might still yield a rent. But Ricardo says precisely the same. It is also distinctly a portion of Ricardo's doctrine that, even apart from differences of situation, the land of a country supposed to be of uniform fertility would, all of it, on a certain supposition, pay rent, namely, if the demand of the community required [pg 243] that it should all be cultivated, and cultivated beyond the point at which a further application of capital begins to be attended with a smaller proportional