the discussions which are going on respecting the
corn laws, and the effects of rent on the price of raw produce, and the
progress of agricultural improvement.

The rent of land may be defined to be that portion of the value of the
whole produce which remains to the owner of the land, after all the
outgoings belonging to its cultivation, of whatever kind, have been
paid, including the profits of the capital employed, estimated according
to the usual and ordinary rate of the profits of agricultural stock at
the time being.

It sometimes happens, that from accidental and temporary circumstances,
the farmer pays more, or less, than this; but this is the point towards
which the actual rents paid are constantly gravitating, and which is
therefore always referred to when the term is used in a general sense.

The immediate cause of rent is obviously the excess of price above the
cost of production at which raw produce sells in the market.

The first object therefore which presents itself for inquiry, is the
cause or causes of the high price of raw produce.

After very careful and repeated revisions of the subject, I do not find
myself able to agree entirely in the view taken of it, either by Adam
Smith, or the Economists; and still less, by some more modern writers.

Almost all these writers appear to me to consider rent as too nearly
resembling in its nature, and the laws by which it is governed,
the excess of price above the cost of production, which is the
characteristic of a monopoly.

Adam Smith, though in some parts of the eleventh chapter of his
first book he contemplates rent quite in its true light, [1] and has
interspersed through his work more just observations on the subject than
any other writer, has not explained the most essential cause of the
high price of raw produce with sufficient distinctness, though he often
touches on it; and by applying occasionally the term monopoly to the
rent of land, without stopping to mark its more radical peculiarities,
he leaves the reader without a definite impression of the real
difference between the cause of the high price of the necessaries of
life, and of monopolized commodities.

Some of the views which the Economists have taken of the nature of rent
appear to me, in like manner, to be quite just; but they have mixed them
with so much error, and have drawn such preposterous and contradictory
conclusions from them, that what is true in their doctrines, has been
obs