Arable  rents  have  risen,  in  the  course  of  the  last  two  and  three
quarter  centuries,  in  many  cases,  eighty  times,  while  wheat  has  risen
eight  times. Pasture  has  risen  about  ten  times. Now  if  there  be
such  a  thing  as  the  indestructible  powers  of  the  soil,  it  is  more
characteristio  of  pasture,  which  cannot  profitably  be  ploughed  up,
than  of  anything  else. But  the  cause  of  the  first  elevation,  as  I


COLLMGE  BENTS,  OXFOBiy  AND  'gAMBBID&E. '    '181

Itope  I  have  now  sufficiently  pointed  out,  is  diffused  agricultural
skill,  and  competition'  for  business  profits. This  is  not  indeed  the
-cause  of  all  rent,  for,  as  I  have  said,  there  is  a  famine  rent,  under
which  the  landowner -by -familiar  processes  takes  from  the  cultivator
■of  the  soil  all  but  a  bare  subsistence. During  the  seventeenth  century
the  English  farmer  had  experience  of  a  famiue  rent. For  the  last
•eight  years,  it  has  been  renewed. The  Irish  farmer,  who  is  inniae  cases
•out  of  ten  a  labourer  paid  ia  land,  has  had  no  other  experience  than
that  of  a  famine  rent. The  Nemesis  has  come  in  both  countries,
•and  even  the  nineteen  years  lease,  which  the  Duke  of  Argyll  thinks
the  quintessence  of  human  wisdom,  gilded  by  the  most  perfect
justice,  is  discredited. When  will  people  learn  that  high  prices  do
mot  make  high  rents,  that  folly  may  destroy  what  it  can  never  re-
cover, and  that  the  best  way  to  extinguish  all  human  interest  in  rent
is  to  deny  that  it  is  a  matter  of  human  institution,  while  it  is  the
result  of  an  intelligence  possessed  by  the  occupier  and  not  by  the
landowner,  except  under  peculiar  circumstances,  and  is  in  no  sense
divine  or  providential  ?

One  of  the  ways  ia  which  the  owners  of  land  have  striven  to  main-
tain artificial  rents  has  been,  first,  by  starving  the  peasant,  next  by
;pntting  the  cost  of  his  necessary  maintenance  on  other  people. I  have
«,lready  described  to  you  how  this  system  was  developed. It  has
been  most  disastrous  to  those  who  devised  and  carried  it  out. I
don't  know  whether  the  farmer  and  landowner  will  ever  find  out
that  low  wages  do  not  mean  cheap  labour ;  but  it  is  a  common-place
-even  with  economists  of  the  stupid  school,  and  a  truth  which  they
have  been  able  to  grasp,  for  they  learnt  so  much  from  Adam
Smith. 