Book I, Chapter XI, 3

In Virginia and Maryland, tobacco is cultivated in preference to corn because it is more profitable. Tobacco could be grown profitably across most of Europe. But in almost every part of Europe it has become an important object of taxation, and it has been thought harder to collect a tax from every farm where it might be grown than to levy a tax on its importation at the custom-house. For this reason, growing tobacco has been prohibited, most absurdly, throughout most of Europe. This inevitably gives something of a monopoly to the countries where it is allowed, and Virginia and Maryland, as its leading producers, enjoy a large share of that monopoly's advantage, though they have some competitors. Growing tobacco, however, does not appear to be as profitable as growing sugar. I have never even heard of a tobacco plantation improved and cultivated with the capital of merchants living in Great Britain; nor do our tobacco colonies send home the wealthy planters whom we so often see arrive from our sugar islands. Although the preference for tobacco over corn in those colonies suggests that Europe's effectual demand for tobacco is not fully met, it probably comes closer to being met than its demand for sugar. And although tobacco's present price probably more than covers all the rent, wages, and profit needed to prepare it and bring it to market at the rates ordinarily paid on corn land, the surplus cannot be as great as it is for sugar at its present price. Accordingly, our tobacco planters have shown the same fear of a glut of tobacco as the owners of established French vineyards have shown of a glut of wine. By an act of assembly, they have limited cultivation to six thousand plants, thought to yield a thousand weight of tobacco, for every negro between sixteen and sixty years of age. They calculate that such a negro can also tend four acres of Indian corn in addition to that amount of tobacco. To keep the market from being overstocked, they have sometimes, in years of abundance, burned a certain quantity of tobacco for every negro, according to Dr Douglas [Douglas’s Summary, vol. ii. p. 379, 373.]—though I suspect he has been misinformed—just as the Dutch are said to do with spices. If methods so extreme are necessary to maintain tobacco's present price, any advantage its cultivation still has over corn is unlikely to endure long.

In this way, the rent of cultivated land producing human food regulates the rent of most other cultivated land. No particular crop can yield less for long, since the land would immediately be turned to another use. If a particular crop regularly yields more, it is because too little land can be adapted to grow it to meet the effectual demand.

In Europe, corn is the principal product of land used directly as human food. Except in particular circumstances, then, the rent of corn land regulates that of all other cultivated land in Europe. Britain need envy neither the vineyards of France nor the olive groves of Italy. Except in particular circumstances, their value is regulated by that of corn, in which Britain's fertility is not much below that of either country.

If in some country the people's common and favorite vegetable food came from a plant that, on the most ordinary land and with the same or nearly the same cultivation, yielded far more than corn does even on the most fertile land, the landlord's rent would necessarily be much greater. So would the surplus food left to him after paying for labor and replacing the farmer's stock with its ordinary profits. Whatever the usual cost of maintaining labor in that country, this larger surplus could always support more of it, and thus enable the landlord to buy or command more of it. The real value of his rent—his actual power and authority, his command over the necessities and comforts that other people's labor could furnish him—would necessarily be much greater.

A rice field produces far more food than the most fertile cornfield. Two yearly crops of thirty to sixty bushels apiece are said to be the ordinary yield of an acre. Although rice requires more labor to cultivate, a much larger surplus remains after all that labor has been maintained. Thus in countries where rice is the people's common and favorite vegetable food, and where the cultivators principally live on it, the landlord should receive a larger share of this larger surplus than landlords do in corn-growing countries. In Carolina, the planters, as in other British colonies, are generally farmers and landlords at once, so rent is merged with profit. There rice cultivation is found more profitable than corn cultivation, although its fields yield only one crop a year and, because European habits prevail, rice is not the people's common and favorite vegetable food.

A good rice field is a bog throughout the year and, for part of the year, a bog under water. It is fit neither for corn, pasture, nor vines, nor indeed for any other vegetable crop of much use to people; and land suited to those purposes is not suited to rice. Even in rice-growing countries, therefore, the rent of rice land cannot regulate the rent of other cultivated land, which can never be turned to rice.

A potato field produces at least as much food as a rice field and far more than a wheat field. Twelve thousand weight of potatoes from an acre is no more exceptional a yield than two thousand weight of wheat. The amount of food, or solid nourishment, drawn from the two plants is not quite proportional to their weight, because potatoes contain so much water. But even if we allow half the weight of this root for water—a very generous allowance—an acre of potatoes still yields six thousand weight of solid nourishment, three times what an acre of wheat yields. An acre of potatoes costs less to cultivate than an acre of wheat: the fallow that usually comes before wheat is sown more than offsets the hoeing and other special cultivation potatoes invariably require. If this root should ever become, in any part of Europe, the people's common and favorite vegetable food, as rice is in some rice-growing countries, and occupy the same share of cultivated land that wheat and other grains grown for human food occupy now, the same amount of cultivated land would feed many more people. With laborers ordinarily fed on potatoes, more would be left over after replacing all the stock and maintaining everyone employed in cultivation. More of that surplus would also go to the landlord. Population would grow, and rents would rise far above their present level.

Land fit for potatoes is fit for almost every other useful vegetable crop. If potatoes occupied the same share of cultivated land that corn does now, they would likewise regulate the rent of most other cultivated land.

In parts of Lancashire, I have been told, people claim that oatmeal bread is more sustaining for laborers than wheat bread, and I have often heard the same claim in Scotland. I am somewhat doubtful of it. Ordinary people in Scotland, fed on oatmeal, are generally neither as strong nor as good-looking as people of the same rank in England, fed on wheat bread. They neither work as well nor look as well. Since no corresponding difference appears among the fashionable classes of the two countries, experience would seem to indicate that the ordinary Scottish diet is less suited to the human constitution than that of their English counterparts. With potatoes, however, the case appears different. London's chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers, and those unfortunate women who live by prostitution—perhaps the strongest men and most beautiful women in the British dominions—are said for the most part to come from the lowest rank of Irish society, whose people generally live on this root. No food could give more decisive proof of its nourishing power, or of its special fitness for human health.

Potatoes are hard to preserve throughout the year and cannot, like corn, be stored for two or three years at a time. Fear that they may rot before they can be sold discourages their cultivation and is perhaps the chief obstacle to their ever becoming, like bread, the principal vegetable food of every class in a large country.

PART II.—Of the Produce of Land That Sometimes Affords Rent and Sometimes Does Not.

Human food seems to be the only product of land that always and necessarily brings the landlord some rent. Other products may or may not do so, according to circumstances.

After food, clothing and shelter are humanity's two great needs.

In its original, uncultivated condition, land can supply materials for clothing and shelter to many more people than it can feed. Once improved, it can sometimes feed more people than it can furnish with those materials—at least in the forms they want and are willing to pay for. In the first condition, therefore, these materials are always abundant to excess and often have little value or none at all. In the second, they are often scarce, which necessarily increases their value. In the first, much is discarded as useless, and the price of whatever is used is reckoned as no more than the labor and expense of preparing it for use; it can therefore pay the landlord no rent. In the second, everything is used, and demand often exceeds the available supply. Someone will always pay for each part more than enough to cover the cost of bringing it to market. Its price can therefore always provide some rent to the landlord.

The skins of large animals were the first materials of clothing. Among nations of hunters and shepherds, therefore, whose food consists mainly of the flesh of those animals, everyone who provides himself with food also provides himself with materials for more clothing than he can wear. Without foreign trade, most of these skins would be thrown away as worthless. This was probably true among the hunting peoples of North America before Europeans reached their country; now they exchange their surplus pelts for blankets, firearms, and brandy, giving those pelts some value. In the present commercial condition of the known world, even the most barbarous nations among whom ownership of land has been established, I believe, engage in some such foreign trade. They find among their wealthier neighbors a demand for all the clothing materials their land produces that cannot be worked up or consumed at home. That demand raises the price above the cost of sending the materials to those neighbors and thereby provides some rent to the landlord. When most Highland cattle were eaten on their own hills, exporting their hides was the most important branch of that country's trade, and what was received for them added something to the rent of Highland estates. England's wool, which long ago could neither be used nor worked up at home, found a market in the wealthier and more industrious Flanders of that time, and its price added something to the rent of the land that produced it. In countries no better cultivated than England was then, or than the Scottish Highlands are now, but without foreign trade, clothing materials would plainly be so abundant that much of them would be discarded as useless and none would bring the landlord any rent.

Materials for building shelter cannot always be carried as far as clothing materials and do not become objects of foreign trade as readily. When they abound in the country that produces them, they often have no value for the landlord, even in today's commercial world. A good stone quarry near London would yield substantial rent; in many parts of Scotland and Wales, it yields none. Timber for building is very valuable in a populous, well-cultivated country, and the land growing it yields substantial rent. In many parts of North America, however, a landlord would be grateful to anyone willing to take away most of his large trees. In parts of the Scottish Highlands, the bark is the only part of a tree that can be taken to market, for want of roads and water transport; the timber is left to rot on the ground. Where materials for shelter abound to this degree, the part actually used is worth no more than the labor and expense of preparing it for use. It yields no rent to the landlord, who generally lets anyone have it who takes the trouble to ask. Demand from wealthier nations, however, sometimes enables him to charge rent for it. Paving the streets of London has enabled the owners of barren rocks on Scotland's coast to draw rent from property that had never yielded any before. The woods of Norway and the Baltic coasts find markets in many parts of Great Britain that they cannot find at home, and thus yield their owners some rent.

Countries are populous not in proportion to the number of people their produce can clothe and shelter, but in proportion to the number it can feed. Once food is supplied, the necessary clothing and shelter are easy to find. Yet food may often be hard to find even when clothing and shelter are at hand. In some parts of the British dominions, one man can build what is called a house with a single day's labor. The simplest clothing, animal skins, takes somewhat more labor to dress and prepare for use, though not very much. Among savage or barbarous nations, a hundredth, or little more than a hundredth, of the whole year's labor will suffice to supply clothing and shelter that satisfy most people. All the other ninety-nine parts are often scarcely enough to supply them with food.

In Virginia and Maryland, growers favor tobacco over corn because it is more profitable. Tobacco could be grown profitably in most of Europe. But nearly every European country taxes it heavily. Governments have apparently thought it harder to collect a tax from each farm that might grow tobacco than to tax imports at the customs house. For this reason, tobacco growing has been quite absurdly banned in most of Europe. The ban gives a kind of monopoly to places where growing it is allowed. Virginia and Maryland, as the largest producers, enjoy a large share of this monopoly's benefits, though they have some competitors. Growing tobacco, however, does not seem as profitable as growing sugar. I have never even heard of a tobacco plantation developed and farmed with capital belonging to merchants living in Great Britain. Nor do our tobacco colonies send home wealthy planters like those who often arrive from our sugar islands. Tobacco's preference over corn in those colonies suggests that European demand from buyers able to pay its ordinary costs is not fully met. But that demand is probably closer to being met than the demand for sugar. Today's tobacco price is probably more than enough to pay the rent, wages, and profit needed to prepare it and bring it to market at the rates usually paid on corn land. Yet it cannot be as far above those costs as the current price of sugar is. Our tobacco planters have accordingly shown the same fear of too much tobacco that established French vineyard owners have of too much wine. By an act of assembly, they have limited cultivation to six thousand plants, expected to yield a thousand weight of tobacco, for every negro between sixteen and sixty years of age. They calculate that, in addition to this tobacco, such a person can tend four acres of Indian corn. To prevent an oversupply in good years, we are told by Dr Douglas [Douglas’s Summary, vol. ii. p. 379, 373.] that they have sometimes burned a fixed quantity of tobacco for every negro, as the Dutch are said to do with spices. I suspect his information is wrong. If such drastic measures are needed to maintain tobacco's present price, whatever extra advantage its cultivation still has over corn will probably not last long.

This is how rent from cultivated land producing food for people sets the rent of most other cultivated land. No particular crop can pay less for long, because its land would immediately be put to another use. If a crop regularly pays more, it is because too little land can be made suitable for it to meet demand from buyers able to pay its ordinary costs.

In Europe, corn is the main crop that feeds people directly. Except in special locations, rent from cornfields therefore sets rent for all other cultivated land in Europe. Britain need not envy France's vineyards or Italy's olive groves. Except in special locations, their value is set by the value of corn, and Britain's land is not much less fertile for corn than land in either country.

Suppose a country's usual and favorite plant food came from a crop that ordinary land could grow in much greater quantities than even the best corn land, using the same or almost the same methods. Landlords would necessarily receive much higher rent, measured as the extra food remaining after paying workers and replacing the farmer's stock along with its ordinary profits. Whatever it usually cost to support workers in that country, this larger surplus could support more of them. The landlord could therefore buy or command more labor. His rent would have much greater real value. He would have more power and authority, and greater access to the necessities and comforts that other people's labor could supply.

A rice field produces much more food than even the most fertile cornfield. An acre is said to produce two harvests a year, each of thirty to sixty bushels. Growing rice takes more labor, but after supporting the workers, a much larger surplus remains. Where rice is people's usual and favorite plant food and is the main food of those growing it, landlords should therefore receive a larger share of this larger surplus than landlords in corn-growing countries. In Carolina, planters, as in other British colonies, are generally both farmers and landlords, so rent and profit are combined. There, rice growing is found to be more profitable than corn growing. This is so even though their fields produce only one harvest a year and European customs mean rice is not the people's usual and favorite plant food.

A good rice field is swampy throughout the year and covered with water during one season. It is unsuitable for corn, pasture, vineyards, or indeed any other plant crop of much use to people. Land suitable for those other purposes is unsuitable for rice. Even in rice-growing countries, then, rent from rice fields cannot set rent for other cultivated land, which can never be used to grow rice.

A potato field produces at least as much food as a rice field and far more than a wheat field. Twelve thousand weight of potatoes from an acre is no greater a harvest than two thousand weight of wheat. Potatoes contain much water, so the amount of solid food each crop yields is not exactly proportional to its weight. But even if we count half the weight of the potatoes as water—a very generous allowance—an acre still yields six thousand weight of solid nourishment. That is three times the wheat yield. An acre of potatoes costs less to cultivate than an acre of wheat. The fallow period that usually comes before wheat sowing more than makes up for the hoeing and other extra care potatoes always need. If potatoes ever became people's usual and favorite plant food anywhere in Europe, as rice is in some countries, they might occupy the share of cultivated land now used for wheat and other food grains. The same area of farmland would then support many more people. Because workers would generally eat potatoes, a larger surplus would remain after replacing all the stock and supporting everyone employed in cultivation. Landlords would also receive a larger share of that surplus. Population would grow and rents would rise far above their present levels.

Land suitable for potatoes is also suitable for nearly every other useful plant crop. If potatoes occupied the same share of farmland that corn does now, they would likewise set the rent of most other cultivated land.

I have been told that some people in Lancashire claim oatmeal bread gives workers more strength than wheat bread. I have often heard the same claim in Scotland. But I somewhat doubt it. Ordinary people in Scotland who eat oatmeal are generally neither as strong nor as good-looking as people of the same class in England, who eat wheat bread. They do not work as well or look as well. There is no comparable difference among fashionable people in the two countries. Experience thus seems to show that the ordinary Scottish diet suits human bodies less well than the diet of their English counterparts. Potatoes appear to be different. London's chairmen, porters, and coal-heavers, and the unfortunate women there who live by prostitution, are said to come mostly from the poorest people of Ireland, who generally eat potatoes. They may be the strongest men and most beautiful women in the British dominions. No food could give clearer evidence that it is nutritious and especially well suited to human health.

Potatoes are hard to keep through the year and impossible to store for two or three years as corn can be stored. Farmers worry that they will rot before they can be sold. This discourages potato growing and may be the main reason potatoes have not become, like bread, the chief plant food of all social classes in any large country.

Part II.—On Produce of Land That Sometimes Provides Rent and Sometimes Does Not.

Food for people seems to be the only product of land that always and necessarily brings the landlord some rent. Other products may or may not do so, depending on circumstances.

After food, people's two main needs are clothing and shelter.

Land in its original, undeveloped condition can provide clothing and building materials for far more people than it can feed. Once developed, it can sometimes feed more people than it can supply with those materials, at least in the forms people want and will pay for. In the first condition there is always an excess of materials, which often have little or no value. In the second, there is often a shortage, which raises their value. In the first condition much is thrown away as useless. What is used is worth no more than the work and expense of making it usable, so it provides the landlord no rent. In the second, people use all of it and often want more than is available. Someone is always willing to pay more for each portion than the cost of bringing it to market. Its price can therefore provide the landlord some rent.

The skins of large animals were the first clothing materials. Among hunting and herding peoples, who chiefly eat the meat of these animals, each person securing food also secures materials for more clothing than he can wear. Without foreign trade, most of the skins would be thrown away as worthless. That was probably true of North America's hunting peoples before Europeans discovered their country. They now exchange their surplus animal skins for blankets, firearms, and brandy, giving the skins some value. In the world's present state of trade, I believe that even the peoples regarded as most uncivilized, where landownership exists, trade abroad in this way. Wealthier neighbors demand the clothing materials their land produces that cannot be made into goods or used at home. This demand raises their price above the cost of sending them to those neighbors and thus gives the landlord some rent. When most Highland cattle were eaten in their own hills, exported hides were the region's chief item of trade. What the hides brought in added something to rent from Highland estates. In earlier times, England could not use or process all its wool at home. It found a market in Flanders, then a richer and more industrious country, and its price added something to the rent of the land that produced it. But imagine countries no better cultivated than England was then, or the Scottish Highlands are now, without foreign trade. Clothing materials there would plainly be so abundant that much would be thrown away as useless, and none could bring the landlord rent.

Building materials cannot always be carried as far as clothing materials and are less readily traded abroad. When they are abundant where they are produced, they often have no value to the landlord, even in today's trading world. A good stone quarry near London would bring in substantial rent. In many parts of Scotland and Wales it brings in none. Wood for building is very valuable in a densely settled, well-cultivated country, and land producing it brings in substantial rent. But in many parts of North America, landowners would thank anyone willing to carry off most of their large trees. In some parts of the Scottish Highlands, a lack of roads and water transport means only the bark can reach a market. The timber is left to rot on the ground. When building materials are so abundant, the amount used is worth only the work and expense of preparing it. It brings the landlord no rent. He generally lets anyone use it who takes the trouble to ask. Demand from richer countries, though, sometimes lets him collect rent. Paving London's streets has allowed the owners of some barren Scottish coastal rocks to collect rent from them for the first time. Woods in Norway and along the Baltic coast supply markets in many parts of Great Britain that they could not find at home, and thereby give their owners some rent.

A country's population depends not on how many people its land can clothe and house but on how many it can feed. Where food is available, necessary clothing and shelter are easy to find. But even when clothing and shelter are readily available, food can be hard to find. In some parts of the British dominions, one man can build what is called a house in a day's work. The simplest clothing, animal skins, takes a little more work to prepare for wearing, but still not much. Among peoples considered savage or barbarous, a hundredth, or little more than a hundredth, of all the year's labor is enough to provide clothing and shelter that satisfy most people. The other ninety-nine parts of that labor are often barely enough to feed them.