every
well-governed society, and that their pressure on subsistence
characterizes the lower, not the more advanced, stages of civilization.
He denied the universal truth, for all stages of cultivation, of the law
of diminishing returns from land.

His fundamental theoretic position relates to the antithesis of wealth
and value. Carey held that land, as we are concerned with it in
industrial life, is really an instrument of production which has been
formed as such by man, and that its value is due to the labour expended
on it in the past--though measured, not by the sum of that labour, but
by the labour necessary under existing conditions to bring new land to
the same stage of productiveness. He studied the occupation and
reclamation of land with peculiar advantage as an American, for whom the
traditions of first settlement were living and fresh, and before whose
eyes the process was indeed still going on. The difficulties of adapting
a primitive soil to the work of yielding organic products for man's use
can be lightly estimated only by an inhabitant of a country long under
cultivation. It is, in Carey's view, the overcoming of these
difficulties by arduous and continued effort that entitles the first
occupier of land to his property in the soil. Its present value forms a
very small proportion of the cost expended on it, because it represents
only what would be required, with the science and appliances of our
time, to bring the land from its primitive into its present state.
Property in land is therefore only a form of invested capital--a
quantity of labour or the fruits of labour permanently incorporated with
the soil; for which, like any other capitalist, the owner is compensated
by a share of the produce. He is not rewarded for what is done by the
powers of nature, and society is in no sense defrauded by his sole
possession. The so-called Ricardian theory of rent is a speculative
fancy, contradicted by all experience. Cultivation does not in fact, as
that theory supposes, begin with the best, and move downwards to the
poorer soils in the order of their inferiority. The light and dry higher
lands are first cultivated; and only when population has become dense
and capital has accumulated, are the low-lying lands, with their greater
fertility, but also with their morasses, inundations, and miasmas,
attacked and brought into occupation. Rent, regarded as a proportion of
the produce, sinks, like all interest on capital,