Though it may cost no more labour to cultivate the one than the other, it must always cost more to bring the produce of the distant land to market.A greater quantity of labour, therefore, must be maintained out of it; and the surplus, from which are drawn both the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord, must be diminished.But in remote parts of the country the rate of profits, as has already been shown, is generally higher than in the neighbourhood of a large town.A smaller proportion of this diminished surplus, therefore, must belong to the landlord.
Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town.
They are upon that account the greatest of all improvements.They encourage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the most extensive circle of the country.They are advantageous to the town, by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its neighbourhood.They are advantageous even to that part of the country.Though they introduce some rival commodities into the old market, they open many new markets to its produce.Monopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can never be universally established but in consequence of that free and universal competition which forces everybody to have recourse to it for the sake of self-defence.It is not more than fifty years ago that some of the counties in the neighbourhood of London petitioned the Parliament against the extension of the turnpike roads into the remoter counties.Those remoter counties, they pretended, from the cheapness of labour, would be able to sell their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than themselves, and would thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their cultivation.Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has been improved since that time.
A cornfield of moderate fertility produces a much greater quantity of food for man than the best pasture of equal extent.
Though its cultivation requires much more labour, yet the surplus which remains after replacing the seed and maintaining all that labour, is likewise much greater.If a pound of butcher's meat, therefore, was never supposed to be worth more than a pound of bread, this greater surplus would everywhere be of greater value, and constitute a greater fund both for the profit of the farmer and the rent of the landlord.It seems to have done so universally in the rude beginnings of agriculture.
But the relative values of those two different species of food, bread and butcher's meat, are very different in the different periods of agriculture.In its rude beginnings, the unimproved wilds, which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are all abandoned to cattle.There is more butcher's meat than bread, and bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest competition, and which consequently brings the greatest price.At Buenos Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty pence halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred.He says nothing of the price of bread, probably because he found nothing remarkable about it.An ox there, he says, cost little more than the labour of catching him.
But corn can nowhere be raised without a great deal of labour, and in a country which lies upon the river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to the silver mines of Potosi, the money price of labour could not be very cheap.It is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of the country.There is then more bread than butcher's meat.The competition changes its direction, and the price of butcher's meat becomes greater than the price of bread.
By the extension besides of cultivation, the unimproved wilds become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher's meat.A great part of the cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and fattening cattle, of which the price, therefore, must be sufficient to pay, not only the labour necessary for tending them, but the rent which the landlord and the profit which the farmer could have drawn from such land employed in tillage.The cattle bred upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the same price as those which are reared upon the most improved land.The proprietors of those moors profit by it, and raise the rent of their land in proportion to the price of their cattle.It is not more than a century ago that in many parts of the highlands of Scotland, butcher's meat was as cheap or cheaper than even bread made of oatmeal.The union opened the market of England to the highland cattle.Their ordinary price is at present about three times greater than at the beginning of the century, and the rents of many highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled in the same time.In almost every part of Great Britain a pound of the best butcher's meat is, in the present times, generally worth more than two pounds of the best white bread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes worth three or four pounds.
It is thus that in the progress of improvement the rent and profit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in some measure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and these again by the rent and profit of corn.Corn is an annual crop.Butcher's meat, a crop which requires four or five years to grow.As an acre of land, therefore, will produce a much smaller quantity of the one species of food than of the other, the inferiority of the quantity must be compensated by the superiority of the price.If it was more than compensated, more corn land would be turned into pasture; and if it was not compensated, part of what was in pasture would be brought back into corn.