Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/150

130 more productive instrument of wealth; and to this point we shall have to return. What we have now to notice is that the whole of the reasoning rests on the assumption of competition. The expenses of production, which the sale of the farm produce must cover, are the wages and profits paid to all who have co-operated in placing the produce on the market. Sometimes it is convenient to regard the farmer as incurring the expenses of cultivation and carriage, and receiving, in addition to those expenses, ordinary farming profits; sometimes it is more convenient, and it is perhaps more accurate, to look at the whole process from the outside, and to include in the expenses of production the profits of the farmer himself. But in either case the price at which the produce is sold in the market must be sufficient to afford 'normal' wages to all who have contributed their labour, and 'normal' profits to all who have given capital and management to the entire process of production, including the carriage to the market. It must form an adequate reward for all the effort and expenditure which have been devoted to the undertaking. It must furnish sufficient earnings of labour and interest of capital. So much as this it must yield in the case of those producers, who are placed under the greatest disadvantages, and furnish the last, or, as it may be called, the 'marginal' part, of the supply for which there is a demand; and it is the surplus above this amount which competition transfers to the landlords as rent.

All this reasoning, then, rests on the assumption of competition. It is assumed that, if wages or profits fell below the points, which, on a comparison of the advantages and drawbacks, pecuniary and other, of farming and other occupations, are considered to be normal in the farming industry, some labourers and farmers would seek some more advantageous employment, and that, if they rose above, some fresh competitors would enter the ranks of agriculture. It is assumed that landlord and tenant are actuated by competitive considerations alone, the one trying to obtain the highest and the other the lowest rent. The landlord is not supposed to be influenced by kindly feeling, traditional claims, long connection, or political obligation. The tenant is not supposed to be affected by a sense of attachment to a peculiar farm. But it has generally been recognised that such an assumption may be at variance with fact, and that other than competitive considerations may enter into the determination of the bargain. Land, in England at least, is a species of property, which is considered to be more subject than manufacturing or mercantile wealth to obligations of a customary and