Book I, Chapter XI, 12

First Kind.—The first kind of raw produce whose price rises as improvement advances is that which human industry can scarcely multiply at all. It consists of things nature produces only in limited quantities and which are so perishable that the yields of many seasons cannot be accumulated. Such are most rare and unusual birds and fishes, many kinds of game, nearly all wildfowl, especially migratory birds, and many other things. As wealth and its attendant luxury grow, demand for these things is likely to grow too, while no human effort may be able to increase the supply much beyond its former level. Their quantity remaining the same or nearly so while competition among buyers steadily grows, their price may rise to any extravagance, seemingly without definite limit. If woodcocks became so fashionable that they sold for twenty guineas a-piece, human industry could do little to increase the number brought to market beyond the present supply. The high prices the Romans paid for rare birds and fishes at the height of their grandeur can readily be explained in this way. Those prices reflected not the low value of silver then, but the high value of rarities and curiosities that industry could not multiply at will. For some time before and after the fall of the republic, the real value of silver in Rome was higher than it is in most of Europe today. The republic paid three sestertii, equivalent to about sixpence sterling, for a modius or peck of Sicilian tithe wheat. This was probably below the average market price, however, since the obligation to deliver wheat at that rate was regarded as a tax on Sicilian farmers. When the Romans ordered more corn than the wheat tithe supplied, therefore, their agreement bound them to pay four sestertii, or eightpence sterling a peck, for the surplus. This was probably considered the moderate, reasonable, ordinary or average contract price of the time; it is equivalent to about one-and-twenty shillings a quarter. Before the recent years of scarcity, eight-and-twenty shillings a quarter was the ordinary contract price of English wheat, which was inferior in quality to Sicilian wheat and generally sold for less in the European market. Silver’s value in those ancient times must therefore have stood to its present value inversely as three to four: three ounces of silver then bought the same labor and commodities that four ounces buy now. When we read in Pliny that Seius [Lib. X, c. 29.] bought a white nightingale as a gift for the empress Agrippina for six thousand sestertii, equivalent to about fifty pounds in our present money, and that Asinius Celer [Lib. IX, c. 17.] bought a surmullet for eight thousand sestertii, equivalent to about sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence in our present money, those astonishing prices are apt to strike us as about one third less extravagant than they actually were. Their real price—the labor and subsistence exchanged for them—was about one-third more than their nominal price now suggests. For the nightingale Seius paid the command of as much labor and subsistence as £ 66:13: 4d. would buy today; for the surmullet Asinius Celer paid the command of as much as £ 88:17: 9d. would buy. Those extravagant prices arose less from an abundance of silver than from the labor and subsistence at the Romans’ disposal beyond what they themselves needed. They controlled considerably less silver than the same command of labor and subsistence would procure for them today.

Second Kind.—The second kind of raw produce whose price rises as improvement advances is that which human industry can multiply in proportion to demand. It consists of useful plants and animals that nature produces so abundantly in uncultivated countries that they have little or no value and must give way to more profitable produce as cultivation spreads. For a long period during improvement, their quantity steadily diminishes while demand steadily increases. Their real value—the amount of labor they will buy or command—therefore gradually rises, until they become as profitable to produce as anything else industry can raise on the richest and best-cultivated land. Once that height is reached, the price can hardly rise further. If it did, more land and labor would soon be devoted to increasing their supply.

When cattle, for example, become so dear that cultivating land to grow their feed is as profitable as cultivating it to grow food for people, their price can hardly rise further. If it did, more corn land would soon become pasture. By reducing wild pasture, the extension of tillage reduces the butcher’s meat the country naturally produces without labor or cultivation. At the same time, by increasing the number of people able to exchange either corn or its price for meat, it increases demand. The price of butcher’s meat, and therefore of cattle, must gradually rise until it becomes as profitable to use the richest and best-cultivated land to feed cattle as to raise corn. Tillage can reach the extent needed to lift cattle prices so high only at a late stage of improvement; until then, if the country is advancing at all, their price must go on rising. In some parts of Europe cattle prices may not yet have reached this height. Nowhere in Scotland had they reached it before the Union. If Scottish cattle had always been limited to the Scottish market, where so much land can be used only for grazing compared with land usable for other purposes, their price could scarcely ever have risen high enough to make cultivating land for their feed profitable. In England, as noted already, cattle prices near London seem to have reached this height around the beginning of the last century. They probably reached it much later across most of the more distant counties, and in some may scarcely have reached it yet. Of all the materials in this second class of raw produce, cattle are perhaps the first whose price rises this high as improvement advances.

Indeed, until cattle prices reach this height, it seems scarcely possible to cultivate fully even most land capable of the highest cultivation. On farms too far from towns to bring in manure—that is, on most farms in any extensive country—the amount of well-cultivated land must be proportionate to the manure the farm itself produces, and this in turn to the stock of cattle kept on it. Land is manured either by grazing cattle on it or by feeding them in stables and spreading their dung on the fields. Unless cattle prices cover both the rent and the profit of cultivated land, however, the farmer cannot afford to graze them there, much less feed them in stables. Only the produce of improved and cultivated land can feed stabled cattle; gathering the scant, scattered produce of waste and unimproved land would require too much labor and expense. If cattle prices cannot pay for the produce of improved land when the cattle graze it themselves, they are still less able to pay when that produce must be gathered with considerable additional labor and carried to them in the stable. In such circumstances, no more cattle can profitably be stabled than those needed for tillage. Yet these cannot produce enough manure to keep all the land they are capable of cultivating continually in good condition. The available manure, being insufficient for the whole farm, will naturally be reserved for the land where it can be used most advantageously or conveniently—the most fertile land, perhaps, or land nearest the farmyard. This part will consequently be kept in good condition and fit for tillage. Most of the rest will lie waste, yielding little but miserable pasture sufficient to sustain a few wandering, half-starved cattle. Thus a farm very often has far too many cattle for its actual yield, although it has far too few for complete cultivation. A part of this waste land, after six or seven years of such wretched grazing, may be plowed and yield a poor crop or two of bad oats or another coarse grain. Once utterly exhausted, it must again lie fallow under grazing while another part is plowed, exhausted, and rested in turn. This was generally how the Scottish low country was farmed before the Union. The land constantly well manured and kept in good condition seldom exceeded a third or fourth of a whole farm, and sometimes was less than a fifth or a sixth. None of the rest received manure, though a portion of it was regularly cultivated and exhausted in rotation. Even Scotland’s land capable of good cultivation could plainly produce little under this system compared with its potential yield. Disadvantageous as the system appears, low cattle prices before the Union seem to have made it almost unavoidable. If it still prevails in a considerable part of the country despite the great rise in price, this is no doubt due in many places to ignorance and attachment to old customs; in most, however, it is due to the obstacles the natural course of things puts in the way of establishing a better system promptly. First, tenants are poor and have not yet had time to acquire enough cattle to cultivate their land more fully; the same rise in price that makes a larger stock worth keeping makes that stock harder to acquire. Second, even if they could acquire it, they have not yet had time to make their land fit to support it properly. An increase of stock and improvement of land must go hand in hand; neither can advance far ahead of the other. With no increase of stock there can scarcely be any improvement of land, but there can be no substantial increase of stock without substantial improvement of land, for otherwise the land could not feed it. Only a long course of thrift and industry can remove these natural obstacles to a better system. Perhaps half a century or a century more must pass before the old system, which is slowly disappearing, can be wholly abolished throughout the country. Among all the commercial benefits Scotland has gained from the Union with England, however, this rise in cattle prices is perhaps the greatest. It has increased not only the value of every highland estate, but perhaps has been the chief cause of improvement in the low country.

In every new colony, abundant waste land that can for years serve no purpose but grazing soon makes cattle extraordinarily plentiful; and great abundance necessarily makes everything very cheap. Although all the cattle in the European colonies of America originally came from Europe, they multiplied so quickly and became worth so little that even horses wandered wild through the woods, with no owner thinking it worthwhile to claim them. Long after such colonies are founded, feeding cattle on produce from cultivated land remains unprofitable. Accordingly, the same causes—a lack of manure and a mismatch between the stock used in cultivation and the land it is meant to cultivate—are likely to establish there a system of husbandry like that still found in many parts of Scotland. Describing the agriculture of certain English colonies in North America as he saw it in 1749, Mr Kalm, the Swedish traveler, accordingly remarks that he can hardly recognize in it the English nation, so expert in every branch of agriculture. They make scarcely any manure for their cornfields, he says. Instead, when repeated cropping has exhausted one plot, they clear and cultivate another fresh plot, then move on to a third when that is exhausted. Their cattle roam the woods and other uncultivated land half-starved, having long since eradicated almost all the annual grasses by eating them too early in the spring, before they could flower or shed seed. [Kalm’s Travels, vol 1, pp. 343, 344.] These annual grasses appear to have been the best native grasses in that part of North America; when Europeans first settled there, they grew densely and stood three or four feet high. Kalm was assured that a plot unable to support one cow when he wrote could once have supported four, each yielding four times as much milk as that one cow. Poor pasture had, he believed, caused their cattle to deteriorate perceptibly from generation to generation. They probably resembled the stunted breed common throughout Scotland thirty or forty years ago, now greatly improved in most of the low country—not so much by changing the breed, although that has been tried in places, as by feeding the animals more abundantly.

First Kind.—The first kind of raw product whose price rises as a country improves is one that human effort can hardly increase at all. Nature supplies these things only in limited amounts. They spoil so quickly that people cannot save up the supplies from several seasons. They include most rare and unusual birds and fish, many kinds of game, almost all wild fowl, especially migratory birds, and many other things. As wealth and the luxury that comes with it grow, demand for these things is likely to grow too. Yet human effort may be unable to increase their supply much beyond its former level. Their supply stays the same, or nearly so, while competition among buyers keeps growing. Their price can therefore rise to an extravagant level, apparently without any fixed limit. Even if woodcocks became fashionable enough to sell for twenty guineas apiece, human effort could not bring many more of them to market than it does now. This explains the high prices that the Romans paid for rare birds and fish at the height of their power. Those prices did not result from a low value of silver then, but from the high value of rarities that people could not produce at will. Silver’s real value in Rome, for some time before and after the republic fell, was higher than it is in most of Europe today. The republic paid three sestertii, equal to about sixpence sterling, for a modius, or peck, of Sicily’s tithe wheat. This was probably below the average market price, since the duty to deliver wheat at that rate was regarded as a tax on Sicilian farmers. When the Romans needed more corn than the wheat tithe supplied, their agreement required them to pay four sestertii, or eightpence sterling, per peck for the extra amount. This was probably considered the moderate, reasonable, or ordinary average contract price of the time. It equals about one-and-twenty shillings per quarter. Before the recent years of scarcity, the ordinary contract price of English wheat was eight-and-twenty shillings per quarter. English wheat is inferior in quality to Sicilian wheat and generally sells for less in the European market. So silver’s value then compared with its value now was the inverse of three to four: three ounces of silver then would buy as much labor and as many goods as four ounces do now. Pliny tells us that Seius [Lib. X, c. 29.] bought a white nightingale for the empress Agrippina for six thousand sestertii, equal to about fifty pounds in our present money. He also tells us that Asinius Celer [Lib. IX, c. 17.] paid eight thousand sestertii for a surmullet, equal to about sixty-six pounds thirteen shillings and fourpence in our present money. Those prices seem astonishing, but in fact their extravagance was about one third greater than those money comparisons suggest to us. Their real price, measured in the labor and means of subsistence exchanged for them, was about one-third more than their nominal price suggests today. Seius paid for the nightingale the power to buy as much labor and subsistence as £ 66:13: 4d. would buy today. Asinius Celer paid for the surmullet the equivalent of what £ 88:17: 9d. would buy. These extravagant prices resulted less from an abundance of silver than from the large amount of labor and subsistence those Romans controlled beyond what they needed for themselves. They controlled much less silver than that same command over labor and subsistence would bring them today.

Second Kind.—The second kind of raw product whose price rises as a country improves is one that human effort can increase to meet demand. It includes useful plants and animals that nature produces in such abundance in uncultivated countries that they have little or no value. As cultivation spreads, they give way to more profitable products. For a long period during improvement, their supply steadily shrinks while demand for them steadily grows. Their real value—the amount of labor they can buy or command—therefore rises gradually. Eventually they become as profitable as anything else people can raise on the most fertile and best-cultivated land. Once they reach that point, their value cannot rise much further. If it did, people would soon put more land and effort into increasing the supply.

Take cattle, for example. Once their price makes it as profitable to cultivate land for their feed as for human food, the price cannot rise much further. If it did, more cornfields would soon become pasture. Expanding crop cultivation reduces wild pasture and thus the amount of butcher’s meat the country produces naturally, without labor or cultivation. At the same time, it increases the number of people who have corn, or its price in money, to offer in exchange for meat. Demand therefore rises. The prices of butcher’s meat and cattle must gradually rise until raising cattle feed on the most fertile and best-cultivated land becomes as profitable as raising corn there. But crop cultivation must advance a long way before cattle can reach this price. Until they do, their price must keep rising if the country is improving at all. There may be parts of Europe where cattle have not reached it yet. They had not reached it anywhere in Scotland before the Union. Scotland has so much land that can only be used to feed cattle compared with land suited to other purposes that, if Scottish cattle had always been restricted to the Scottish market, their price might never have risen enough to make it profitable to cultivate land for their feed. As already noted, cattle prices near London seem to have reached that point around the beginning of the last century. They probably did so much later across most distant English counties, and perhaps have barely done so in some of them. Still, among all the products in this second group, cattle are perhaps the first whose price rises to that level as a country improves.

Indeed, until cattle reach that price, it seems nearly impossible to cultivate fully even most land capable of the best cultivation. On farms too far from towns to bring in manure—the great majority of farms in any large country—the amount of well-cultivated land depends on how much manure the farm itself produces. That, in turn, depends on how many cattle it keeps. Cattle manure the land either while grazing on it or when their dung is carried out from the stable where they are fed. But farmers cannot afford to graze cattle on cultivated land unless the cattle’s price covers both the rent and profit from that land. Feeding them in a stable is even less affordable. Only the produce of improved, cultivated land can feed cattle in a stable: collecting the sparse, scattered growth on unimproved waste land would take too much labor and cost too much. So if the cattle’s price does not cover cultivated land’s produce when they graze directly on it, it is even less able to cover that produce when workers must also gather and bring it to the stable. Under these conditions, it is profitable to stable only the cattle needed for plowing. They can never supply enough manure to keep in good condition all the land they can cultivate. Since the manure is insufficient for the whole farm, it goes to the fields where it is most useful or easiest to apply: the most fertile land, perhaps, or the fields near the farmyard. Those fields remain in good condition and fit for crops. Most of the rest lie unused, producing almost nothing but poor pasture that barely keeps a few scattered, half-starved cattle alive. A farm is often heavily stocked relative to its actual output, though it has far fewer cattle than it would need to cultivate all its land fully. After six or seven years of this poor grazing, one part of the unused land may be plowed. It may yield a poor crop or two of bad oats or another coarse grain. Once exhausted, it must rest under pasture again while another part is plowed, exhausted, and rested in turn. This was the general farming system across lowland Scotland before the Union. Land kept constantly well manured and in good condition seldom made up more than a third or a fourth of a farm, and sometimes less than a fifth or a sixth. The rest was never manured, though portions of it were regularly cultivated and exhausted in rotation. Clearly, under this system, even Scotland’s land fit for good cultivation yielded little compared with what it could yield. However harmful this system looks, low cattle prices seem to have made it nearly unavoidable before the Union. It still survives across a considerable part of the country despite a large rise in prices. In many places this is no doubt because of ignorance and attachment to old habits. In most places, though, natural obstacles prevent the quick introduction of a better system. First, tenants are poor. They have not yet had time to acquire enough cattle to cultivate their land more fully. The same rise in price that makes it profitable to keep more cattle makes it harder to buy them. Second, even if they could buy more cattle, they have not yet had time to prepare their land to support them properly. The growth of cattle stock and the improvement of land must go together. Neither can get far ahead of the other. Land can hardly improve without more cattle, but the number of cattle cannot grow much without substantial land improvement, because the land could not support them otherwise. Only a long period of thrift and work can remove these natural obstacles. Perhaps another half-century or century must pass before the old system, which is gradually fading, disappears from every part of the country. Of all the commercial benefits Scotland has gained from union with England, the rise in cattle prices is perhaps the greatest. It has increased the value of all Highland estates and may have been the main cause of improvements in the Lowlands.

In every new colony, there is a great deal of uncultivated land that can serve no other purpose for many years than feeding cattle. Cattle quickly become extremely plentiful, and plentiful goods necessarily become very cheap. All the cattle in America’s European colonies originally came from Europe. Yet they multiplied so quickly and became worth so little that even horses were left to roam wild in the woods, with no owner finding it worthwhile to claim them. Many years must pass after colonies like these are established before feeding cattle on cultivated land becomes profitable. The lack of manure and the mismatch between the stock used in farming and the land it is meant to farm are therefore likely to produce methods similar to those still found in many parts of Scotland. Mr Kalm, the Swedish traveler, described farming in some English North American colonies as he saw it in 1749. He said he could hardly recognize the English people there as a nation so skilled in every branch of agriculture. They make hardly any manure for their cornfields, he said. When repeated crops exhaust one field, they clear and farm another piece of fresh land, then move to a third when the second is exhausted. They let cattle wander in the woods and on other uncultivated land, where they are half-starved. The animals had long since wiped out almost all the annual grasses by eating them too early in spring, before they could flower or shed seeds. [Kalm’s Travels, vol 1, pp. 343, 344.] Those annual grasses seem to have been the best native grasses in that part of North America. When Europeans first settled there, they grew thickly and reached three or four feet high. Kalm was told that land which could not support one cow when he wrote had once supported four, each producing four times as much milk as that one cow. He believed poor pasture had damaged the cattle, whose condition visibly worsened from one generation to the next. They were probably much like the stunted cattle common throughout Scotland thirty or forty years ago. Cattle in most of the Lowlands have now improved greatly, less because farmers changed breeds, though some have done that, than because they feed them more plentifully.