be
some machinery in the country still capable of sending the commodity to
market at the reduced price.

The earth has been sometimes compared to a vast machine, presented by
nature to man for the production of food and raw materials; but, to make
the resemblance more just, as far as they admit of comparison, we should
consider the soil as a present to man of a great number of machines, all
susceptible of continued improvement by the application of capital to
them, but yet of very different original qualities and powers.

This great inequality in the powers of the machinery employed in
procuring raw produce, forms one of the most remarkable features which
distinguishes the machinery of the land from the machinery employed in
manufactures.

When a machine in manufactures is invented, which will produce more
finished work with less labour and capital than before, if there be no
patent, or as soon as the patent is over, a sufficient number of such
machines may be made to supply the whole demand, and to supersede
entirely the use of all the old machinery. The natural consequence
is, that the price is reduced to the price of production from the best
machinery, and if the price were to be depressed lower, the whole of the
commodity would be withdrawn from the market.

The machines which produce corn and raw materials on the contrary, are
the gifts of nature, not the works of man; and we find, by experience,
that these gifts have very different qualities and powers. The most
fertile lands of a country, those which, like the best machinery in
manufactures, yield the greatest products with the least labour and
capital, are never found sufficient to supply the effective demand of
an increasing population. The price of raw produce, therefore, naturally
rises till it becomes sufficiently high to pay the cost of raising it
with inferior machines, and by a more expensive process; and, as
there cannot be two prices for corn of the same quality, all the other
machines, the working of which requires less capital compared with the
produce, must yield rents in proportion to their goodness.

Every extensive country may thus be considered as possessing a gradation
of machines for the production of corn and raw materials, including in
this gradation not only all the various qualities of poor land, of
which every large territory has generally an abundance, but the inferior
machinery which may be said to be employed when good land is fur