Chapter I. On The General Principles Of Taxation.

of the community; the margin of cultivation, to use Dr. Chalmers's expression, remains where it was; and the same land or capital, which, as the least productive, already regulated the value and price of the whole produce, will continue to regulate them. The effect which a tax on agricultural produce will have on rent depends on its affecting or not affecting the difference between the return to this least productive land or capital and the returns to other lands and capitals. Now, this depends on the manner in which the tax is imposed. If it is an ad valorem tax, or, what is the same thing, a fixed proportion of the produce, such as tithe for example, it evidently lowers corn-rents. For it takes more corn from the better lands than from the worse, and exactly in the degree in which they are better, land of twice the productiveness paying twice as much to the tithe. Whatever takes more from the greater of