Book I: Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI.

OF THE RENT OF LAND.

Rent, considered as the price paid for the use of land, is naturally the
highest which the tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of
the land. In adjusting the terms of the lease, the landlord endeavours to
leave him no greater share of the produce than what is sufficient to keep up
the stock from which he furnishes the seed, pays the labour, and purchases
and maintains the cattle and other instruments of husbandry, together with
the ordinary profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This is
evidently the smallest share with which the tenant can content himself,
without being a loser, and the landlord seldom means to leave him any more.
Whatever part of the produce, or, what is the same thing, whatever part of
its price, is over and above this share, he naturally endeavours to reserve
to himself as the rent of his land, which is evidently the highest the
tenant can afford to pay in the actual circumstances of the land. Sometimes,
indeed, the liberality, more frequently the ignorance, of the landlord,
makes him accept of somewhat less than this portion ; and sometimes, too,
though more rarely, the ignorance of the tenant makes him undertake to pay
somewhat more, or to content himself with somewhat less, than the ordinary
profits of farming stock in the neighbourhood. This portion, however, may
still be considered as the natural rent of land, or the rent at which it is
naturally meant that land should, for the most part, be let.

The rent of land, it may be thought, is frequently no more than a reasonable
profit or interest for the stock laid out by the landlord upon its
improvement. This, no doubt, may be partly the case upon some occasions ;
for it can scarce ever be more than partly the case. The landlord demands a
rent even for unimproved land, and the supposed interest or profit upon the
expense of improvement is generally an addition to this original rent. Those
improvements, besides, are not always made by the stock of the landlord, but
sometimes by that of the tenant. When the lease comes to be renewed,
however, the landlord commonly demands the same augmentation of rent as if
they had been all made by his own.

He sometimes demands rent for what is altogether incapable of human
improvements. Kelp is a species of sea-weed, which, when burnt, yields an
alkaline salt, useful for making glass, soap, and for several other
purposes. It grows in several parts of Great Britain, particularly in
Scotland, upon such rocks only as lie within the high-water mark, which are
twice every day covered with the sea, and of which the produce, therefore,
was never augmented by human industry. The landlord, however, whose estate
is bounded by a kelp shore of