Part 14

It remains now to consider certain important consequences which flow from this explanation of rent. In the first place, it is evident that three separate incomes are derived from agriculture, whilst two only make their appearance in all other industries. In common with them agriculture furnishes reward or income for two classes of persons--wages for labourers and profit for the employer. There the similarity ends. A third income makes its appearance for a third person--rent for the landlord. This rent is not an ordinary consideration for hiring some useful machine; if it were a compensation of this nature, it would necessarily take its place amongst the items composing the cost of production. It is a part of the profit won, dependent in no way on the value of the property nor on the price at which it was bought, but purely and simply on the degree of the profit realized. It is a part of that profit, estimated and paid as what remains over--a surplus.

But how comes it to pass that an ordinary manufacture does not yield or pay any such third income? For a simple and decisive reason. A Manchester manufacturer cannot permanently earn a higher profit than belongs to his trade. If we suppose 10 per cent. to be the natural profit of that trade, and he persistently realizes 18, other mills will be opened by new men entering into the business, and this process will be continued till his profits are reduced to their legitimate level. It is otherwise with farming. If a tenant reaps 10 per cent. continuously from his farm, when competitors are willing to be content with 8, the landlord will quickly make the discovery, and will add the surplus 2 to the rent he requires. He will obtain the income, because 8 per cent. is judged by the farming world to be an adequate reward for engaging in agriculture, and because no additional land is to be found for the agricultural business.

2. It is clear that tithes, poor-rates, and other permanent charges, fall upon the landlord's rent, and not on the farmer's profit. They diminish rent. This is a point on which much misunderstanding prevails. A loud outcry is raised amongst tenants at this time of agricultural suffering against the heavy payments demanded of them for special taxes imposed upon land; a strong agitation is rising to obtain their repeal, as being unjustifiable wrongs inflicted on the most meritorious of industries. It is not perceived that these charges figured as items in the cost of production when the farmer was calculating what rent the farm would warrant him to pay: they diminished the rent at the cost of the landlord. Tithes and rates took their places in the estimate of the debit side quite as really as the number of horses, or the quantity of manure, which the farm would require. We have seen that rent makes its appearance only after every expense has been provided for, and a legitimate profit secured; then, and not till then, the calculation of the rent begins. If the farming world succeeds in removing these burdens, wholly or in part, from the shoulders of the tenants, there can be no doubt that rents will proportionately rise. The landlords would argue, with entire justice, that all other circumstances remaining the same, the collective farming profit had become larger by the disappearance of these taxes, and as the tenant was entitled only to his natural rate of profit, the increase of surplus would legitimately belong to him. If the tenant repelled such a claim, the landlord would be easily able to obtain the rent he claimed from competing farmers who would be satisfied with the natural profit of the business.

One exception, however, must be allowed to this conclusion--the case, namely, of a tenant who, upon a long lease, had contracted to pay a definite rent for many years. Such a tenant has taken upon himself the chances of the cost of production during a lengthened period, it may be nineteen or twenty-one years, being larger or smaller. If it diminishes during the interval, he gains: if it increases, he loses. Practically he has insured the landlord's rent, during the continuance of the lease, against diminution. For all increase or diminution of rates he fares as if he were the landlord.

3. A third very important deduction follows from the nature of the process which determines rent. Rent does not increase the price of agricultural produce; it does not make bread dearer. Rent is the consequence, not the creator, of price. Here the difference between agriculture and manufacturing trades is vital. The hire or purchase of machinery forms necessarily a part of the cost of manufacturing the goods: it must be paid for by the price realized, or the goods will not be made. On the other hand, the consideration to be given for the use of the land does not enter into the tenant's estimate of his cost of production. He does not direct his inquiry to the right rent till after he has ascertained what the farm will produce, the cost of obtaining it, and the price it will fetch. He then discovers what the profit will be: from it he takes his own necessary share; what is over he hands to the landlord as rent. He does not, like the manufacturer, insist upon a price which must be obtained, for otherwise he would not be able to pay for the use of the machine he borrows; he simply takes the price which he finds in the market, makes himself reasonably sure of the profit which rewards him, and the landlord must take the chance of what rent will remain over, whether large or small. Rent exists because a selling price is found which yields a surplus, an excess of profit beyond what the tenant requires. If price gives no surplus profit, the landlord will get no rent, and he must farm the land himself, or sell it to a farmer.

But there is a peculiarity in the agricultural market which exercises a very powerful influence in raising rents. Most manufactured articles can be dispensed with, or their consumption greatly lessened, if their cost of production is largely increased, or the means of buying diminished. It is otherwise with food: it must be had, must be bought, if any means of purchasing it exist. The effect of this force on a country situated like England is very marked. England cannot supply food for more than half of her population; the other half must be procured from abroad. Now, the principle which governs the price of indispensable food is the law, that the price paid for the dearest article--say, a loaf of bread--which must and will be bought, will impose itself on all like articles which are actually purchased. When the loaf made in England was cheaper than any imported from abroad, then the price of the English loaf rose to the price of the dearest foreign loaves which were sold and purchased in the English markets. This extra-addition of price was a pure surplus of profit received by the English grower of wheat; the cost of production was not changed, nor his requirement of profit for himself augmented. The gain he thus realized, being absolutely surplus profit, passed to the landowner. The need of foreign corn raised his rent. But the picture has a reverse side. It may well happen that the foreign corn landed in England will be saleable at a lower price than the English. If the supply can be furnished in sufficient quantity to provide bread enough for all England, the English corn in that case must inevitably sink to the level of the foreign--its price will fall, the profit realized on its sale may indefinitely sink, and a great reduction of rents throughout England may well be the inevitable consequence. The only weapon wherewith to fight off the disaster would be such a modification of British agriculture as would lead to the cultivation of other crops than wheat.

Here it seems desirable to notice briefly some remarks addressed by Professor Thorold Rogers to the _Daily News_, of October 30th, 1879; for though they are in the main true, they might easily give rise to mischievous misconception. He writes--"There is no doubt that rent is wealth to the recipient, and a means of profit to those who trade with the recipient; but except in so far as it represents the advantageous outlay of capital, it is no more national wealth than the public funds are." Surely this is to ignore the fact that the sources from which rent and the dividends on the public funds are derived differ radically in nature. The dividends on consols are the fruit of taxes levied on the whole people of England, and distributed as such to national creditors, which they may consume as they please. Rent is part of a profit earned by an industry useful to the country. A tax and a profit are not necessarily the same thing. No doubt a profit swollen by a monopoly price is equivalent to a tax: and a rent derived from "the price of the produce of land, raised by excessive demand and stinted supply," would be a forced contribution from consumers. But is all rent the child of monopoly? May it not well happen, does it not constantly happen, that rents are high by the side of cheap corn, because the agricultural business is largely productive through efforts made by landlords in improving the powers of the soil? Are they to be limited down in their reward to the pure interest which they could have obtained for their capital from investments in bonds and debentures? Is not part of the profit realized legitimately due to them, as profit accomplished by a commercial enterprise? If the returns on improvements made by landowners on their estates were limited to the interest which they could have obtained from consols, would not the motive for making such improvements be sadly wanting? It would sound strange in great manufacturing towns to be told that flowing profits are no increase of the public wealth, that they are taxes resembling the public funds, and must be swept away down to the lowest sum compatible with the existence of the industry.

And what must be said of the ugly word, monopoly, which is so freely flung against the owners of rent? There is a sound of unfairness in it; of unearned gains won without effort from the fortunes of others. How is such a reproach to be repelled? To parry the blow does not seem to be so difficult. There is, indeed, a kind of monopoly which is susceptible of no defence, a monopoly of manufacture conferred on a favoured few, by the arbitrary decree of the law, founded on no superior claim of merit or capacity, and resulting in inflated prices and inferiority of service rendered. Such were the monopolies whose abolition an indignant public opinion extorted from Queen Elizabeth. But a superior advantage of production or sale attached by nature to particular individuals or societies belongs to a wholly different class. Life is full of such monopolies. They are inherent and indestructible. The vineyards of France possess a monopoly of incomparable wine which will for all time earn amazing profits paid by voluntary buyers. England enjoys a like monopoly in the juxtaposition of her coal and iron, which have created a trade that no other nation can rival. The eloquent barrister, the acute physician, the brilliant artist, the quick-eyed inventor of machines, the soul-stirring singer, all are endowed with a personal monopoly resulting in great wealth. Are the men and nations who reap the splendid fruit of such a superiority to be stigmatized as despoilers of their fellow-citizens? Is rent, the offspring of a like advantage, to be painted as a tribute exacted from fellow-countrymen compelled to buy food?

But it will be said, change the tenure of the land, and the wrong will disappear. But what system will clear away superior produce and increased price? Certainly not a universal peasant-proprietor class. Such peasants would still possess the command of higher prices conferred by fertility and situation, and by means of such prices they would gather up swollen profits which would in reality be rent. Then let the land be owned by the whole community in common possession, exclaim French Socialists, and let its fruits be distributed in equal shares to every inhabitant. But even in such an extreme case it would be impossible to efface monopoly. The able-bodied man who received the same share of produce as the weak dwarf, the clever artisan who was unable to earn a special reward for his fructifying intelligence, would inevitably reap a diminution of labour and time. His higher faculties would earn a monopoly benefit in leisure.

The conclusion to be drawn is evident. Nature has scattered monopolies broadcast, higher profits, over the world. She has ordained that they shall ever exist. It is futile to stigmatize rent as an exceptional offender against equality.

4. Finally, one more truth comes forth from this explanation, which has a most important bearing on the efficient cultivation of land. The landowner and the tenant are joint partners in a common business. They share a common profit--the first portion belongs to the farmer, the remainder to the landlord. They are both interested in promoting the success of the agriculturist. If the cultivation of the soil thrives even under the shortest leases, the rent is not quickly raised in consequence of the rising profit--whilst under a long lease very considerable gains may be won before a new settlement of the rent can come up for discussion. This partnership brings a powerful motive to act on the landlord to give help in developing the efficiency of the farming. He knows that if he invests capital in draining and other improvements, he increases the productive power of his land, he is laying the foundation of enlarged results, and he cannot fail to perceive that land thus improved must yield a bigger profit, of which the surplus part, the rents, must necessarily be greater. Thus, an important benefit is acquired, not only for the joint partners, but also for the whole population of the country. Such processes generate more abundant and cheaper food. The landlord who never visits his farms, never thinks of them except on rent day, is blind to his own interest, is forgetting that ownership of land is a partnership in a business. He neglects his own enrichment, and leaves needed resources for the nation unused. The active and intelligent landlord, on the contrary, watches the march of agriculture. He observes where the machine, the soil, requires improvement, he notices the farming qualities of the tenant, he lives on friendly relations with him, and deliberates with him on expanding the productive power of the farm. His rent becomes larger--not only by obtaining interest on the capital laid out, but also by sharing in the additional profit which that capital is sure to engender; and that addition will not be grudged by the tenant. He, too, will have prospered by the help of more powerful machinery in his trade, for he is certain of getting an augmented profit from the capital laid out by the landlord. Whatever may be said of the system of land-revenue which prevails in England, one merit it certainly possesses: it tends to bring the capital of a wealthy landowner to take part in enlarging the power of the land and the amount of its produce.

BONAMY PRICE.

[Footnote 1: It is much to be regretted that Professor Jevons in his "Primer of Political Economy" should have omitted in his explanation of rent the action of the forces which Ricardo and Mill sum up in the word situation. He affirms "that rent arises from the fact that different pieces of land are not equally fertile," and that "the rent of better land consists of the surplus of its produce over that of the poorest cultivated land." How is it then that inferior land near great towns pays a much higher rent than very good land in the heart of a rural district, far away from railways or canals, burdened with high poor-rates, and sorely in want of lime or other distant manures? Ricardo himself admits, and so does Mill, that if all lands were equally fertile, and, it may be added, equally well situated as to other forces, they would still pay rent to their owners.]

BUDDHISM AND JAINISM.

In previous papers I have traced the progress of Indian religious thought through the various stages of Vedism, Br[=a]hmanism, Vaishnavism, S´aivism, and S´[=a]ktism, and have pointed out that all these systems more or less run into, and in a manner overlap, one another. We have seen that among the primitive [=A]ryans the air, the fire, and the sun, were believed to contain within themselves mysterious and irresistible forces, capable of effecting tremendous results either for good or evil. They were therefore personified, deified, and worshipped. Some regarded them as manifestations of one Supreme Controller of the Universe; others as separate cosmical divinities with separate powers and attributes.

If the religion of the ancient Indo-[=A]ryans was a form of Theism, it was a Theism of a very uncertain and unsettled character. It was a religious creed based on a vague belief in the sovereignty of unseen natural forces. Such a creed might fairly be called monotheism, henotheism, polytheism, or pantheism, according to the particular standpoint from which it is regarded. But it was not, in its earliest origin, idolatry. Its simple ritual was the natural outcome of each man's earnest effort to express devotional feelings in his own way. Unhappily it did not long retain its simplicity. The Br[=a]hmans soon took advantage of the growth of religious ideas among a people naturally pious and superstitious. They gradually cumbered the simplicity of worship with elaborate ceremonial. They persuaded the people that propitiatory offerings of all kinds were needed to secure the favour of the beings they worshipped, and that such sacrifices could not be performed without the repetition of prayers by a regularly ordained and trained priesthood. But this was not all. They developed and formulated a pantheistic philosophy, based on the physiolatry of the Veda, and overlaid it with subtle metaphysical and ontological speculations. They identified the Supreme Being with all the phenomena of Nature, and maintained that the Br[=a]hmans themselves were his principal human manifestation, the sole repositories and exponents of all religious and philosophical truth, the sole mediators between earth and heaven, the sole link between men and gods. This combination of ritualism and philosophy, which together constituted what is commonly called Br[=a]hmanism, gradually superseded the simple forms of Vedic religion. In process of time, however, the extravagance of Br[=a]hmanical ceremonial, and the tyranny of priestcraft, led to repeated reactions. Efforts after simplicity of worship and freedom of thought were made by various energetic religious leaders at various periods. More than one reformer arose, who attempted to deliver the people from the bondage of a complex ceremonial, and the intolerable incubus of an arrogant sacerdotalism.

It was natural that the most successful opposition to priestcraft should have originated in the caste next in rank to the Br[=a]hmans. Gautama (afterwards called "the Buddha") was a man of the military class (Kshatriya). He was the son of a petty chief who ruled over a small principality called Kapila-vastu, north of the Ganges; but he was not the sole originator of the reactionary movement. He had, in all probability, been preceded by other less conspicuous social reformers, and other leaders of sceptical inquiry. Or other such leaders may have been contemporaneous with himself. We have already pointed out that the philosophy he enunciated was not in its general scope and bearing very different from that of Br[=a]hmanism. The Br[=a]hmans called their system of doctrines "Dharma,"[1] and the Buddha called his by the same name. He recognised no distinguishing term like Buddhism. His simple aim was to remove every merely sacerdotal doctrine from the national religion--to cut away every useless excrescence, and to sweep away every corrupting incrustation. His own doctrines of liberty, equality, and general benevolence towards all creatures, ensured the popularity of his teaching; while the example he himself set of asceticism and self-mortification, secured him a large number of devoted personal adherents. For it is remarkable that just as the Founder of Christianity was Himself a Jew, and required none of His followers to give up their true Jewish creed, or Jewish usages, so the founder of Buddhism was himself a Hind[=u], and did not require his adherents to give up every essential principle of ordinary Hind[=u]ism, or renounce all the religious observances of their ancestors.[2]

Yet it cannot be denied that Buddhism was very different from Br[=a]hmanism, and it is a remarkable fact that, with all his personal popularity, the atheistic philosophy of Gautama was unsuited to the masses of the people. His negations, abstractions, and theories of the non-eternity and ultimate extinction of soul, never commended themselves to the popular mind.

It seemed, indeed, probable that Buddhism was destined to become extinct with its founder. The Buddha died, like other men, and, according to his own doctrine, became absolutely extinct. Nothing remained but the relics of his burnt body, which were distributed in all directions. No successor was ready to step into his place. No living representative was competent to fill up the void caused by his death. Nothing seemed more unlikely than that the mere recollection of his teaching and example, though perpetuated by the rapid multiplication of shrines, symbols, and images of his person,[3] should have power to secure the continuance of his system in his own native country for more than ten centuries, and to disseminate his doctrines over the greater part of Asia. What, then, was the secret of its permanence and diffusion? It really had no true permanence. Buddhism never lived on in its first form, and never spread anywhere without taking from other systems quite as much as it imparted. The tolerant spirit which was its chief distinguishing characteristic permitted its adherents to please themselves in adopting extraneous doctrines. Hence it happened that the Buddhists were always ready to acquiesce in, and even conform to, the religious practices of the countries to which they migrated, and to clothe their own simple creed in, so to speak, a many-coloured vesture of popular legends and superstitious ideas.

Even in India, where the Buddha's memory continued to be perpetuated by strong personal recollections and local associations, as well as by relics, symbols, and images, his doctrines rapidly lost their distinctive character, and ultimately, as we have already shown, merged in the Br[=a]hmanism whence they originally sprang.