Page:The Three Prize Essays on Agriculture and the Corn Law - Morse, Greg, Hope (1842).djvu/14

 of stock, will always command high rents. At present, in the immediate neighbourhood of Edinburgh, £8 to £10 per acre is a common rent for pasture fields, for which, if they were a few miles distant from the town, half those sums would be thought extravagant.

Perhaps you may have seen statements, by agricultural writers, of the expenses of cultivation and the value of the produce of a farm, and the difference exhibited between high and moderate prices, showing results apparently disastrous enough. If, however, you examine these statements narrowly, you will observe that an obvious fallacy pervades the whole, even where the different expenses appear to be fairly given. This consists in every thing being converted into money, such as expenses of keeping horses, cows, &c., and the price of seed, corn, &c., whereas, were these and the landlord's rent deducted in grain, as they ought to be, and if the tenant had, as his share, one hundred or two hundred quarters of wheat, or other grain, according to circumstances, it would then be seen that there was little if any cause of complaint.

I fearlessly appeal to you, my brother farmers throughout the kingdom, if there is not a mighty deal of humbug vented about the price necessary to remunerate the farmer, and about the expense of raising grain. You and I both know well that these depend almost, if not altogether, upon the rent. It is high money rents that make farmers sometimes think corn too cheap, and that is too often the cause of all their perplexing anxieties. When markets are high, farms are taken at such rents as if prices never could by any possibility fall lower, and then not seldom the tenant exists, as such, only by the generosity of his landlord, or bankruptcy and ruin follow. Free Trade would do away in part with that ruinous competition among farmers for land, by opening up other and more profitable investments for capital; while, by steadying the markets, which, by widening the range from whence the supplies are drawn, it would unquestionably do, it would enable us farmers to know something near what prices might be expected in ordinary seasons, and to frame our calculations accordingly. For it is those violent fluctuations that derange all our economy. No doubt if an individual occupies a farm on lease, at a money rent, it is his interest to obtain and keep up the price of grain as high as possible; but the moment his lease expires, a corresponding advance to the rise in the price of grain takes place in his rent, and justly too. But where the rent is regulated by the price of grain, which is by far the simplest and the safest measure of value, it is a matter of comparative indifference to the farmer what the price may be. In truth, it is then sometimes