rise of the price of corn and an increase of rent. These consequences, however, will not take place with the same rapidity as if the higher rate of profit had continued. At the end of twenty years the country will have a smaller population and capital than, but for the tax, it would by that time have had; the landlords will have a smaller rent, and the price of corn, having increased less rapidly than it would otherwise have done, will not be so much as a tenth higher than what, if there had been no tax, it would by that time have become. A part of the tax, therefore, will already have ceased to fall on the consumer and devolved upon the landlord, and the proportion will become greater and greater by lapse of time.
But though tithes and other taxes on agricultural produce, when of long standing, either do not raise the price of food and lower profits at all, or, if at all, not in proportion to the tax, yet the abrogation of such taxes, when they exist, does not the less diminish price, and, in general, raise the rate of profit. The abolition of a tithe takes one tenth from the cost of production, and consequently from the price, of all agricultural produce; and, unless it permanently raises the laborer's requirements, it lowers the cost of labor and raises profits. Rent, estimated in money or in commodities, generally remains as before; estimated in agricultural produce, it is raised. The country adds as much, by the repeal of a tithe, to the margin which intervenes between it and the stationary [pg 570] state as was cut off from that margin by the tithe when first imposed. Accumulation is greatly accelerated, and, if population also increases, the price of corn immediately begins to recover itself and rent to rise, thus gradually transferring the benefit of the remission from the consumer to the landlord.