The productive power of agriculture is not free in any country when the agri culturist is fettered by restrictions upon the sale of his produce ; whether the re striations are imposed by his own State and exclude him from selling his proclaim where he can, or whether they are ins. posed by another State which refires to receive his surplus produce. In neither case will agriculture attain the develop ment of which it is capable. In France the free intercourse between the different provinces of the kingdom was once im peded by many restrictions, and corn could not be taken eveu from one pro vince to another. The consequence was that agriculture was in a wretched con dition, but it improved rapidly when the restrictions were removed. The history of all countries shows that the inter ference with the power of disposing of agricultural produce has been unfavour able to agriculture, and consequently in jurious to the whole community. Nor is the agriculture of a country free when the land or its products are subject to heavy taxes, direct or indirect. Such taxes raise the price of agricultural pro duce, and so far diminish the power of persons to buy it; they also increase the amount of capital requisite for culti vating a piece of land, for the payment of the taxes is not always made to &pm.41 on the amount of produce raised, or on the time when the produce is by sale con verted into money. Payments the amount of which depends on the amount of pro duce, may either be in the nature of rent, that is, the amount which a cultivator agrees to give to the owner of the land for the use of it : or they may be pay ments which the land owes to some per son or persons not the owner or owners, and quite independent of the payment due to the landowner; to this second class of payments belong Tithes. The cultivator of the Roman Public Land paid the State a tenth of the produce of arable land, and a fifth of the produce of land planted with productive trees. But even this mode of payment is an obstacle to improvement, for the occupier must lay out capital in order to increase the pro duce of the land ; and it will often hap pen that he pays the tenth of the pro before he has got back his capital, and long before the outlay brings him a profit. The money payment which a man makes to the owner of land for the use of it, is the value of the produce which remains after all expenses of cultivation, and all costs and charges incident to the cultivation are paid, and the average rate of profit also are returned to the culti vator: at least this is the general mode in which the amount of rent under ordi nary circumstances will be determined. It may therefore be as low as nothing. How high it may be depends on various circumstances. [RENT.] If the agriculture of a country is free from all restrictions, it may in a given time reach the limit of its productive powers. In a country which has a con siderable extent of surface and variety of soil, this limit may not be reached for many centuries, because improvement in agriculture is slower than in almost every other branch of industry. The best lands will be first occupied, and carelessly cul tivated, as in America ; the inferior lands will in course of time be resorted to, and finally the results of modern science will be applied to improve the methods of cul tivation. An agricultural country, or a country which produces only raw pro ducts, and has no manufactures, will have reached the limit of its productive powers when it has raised from the soil all that can be profitably raised. Whether it will have a large surplus of agricultural produce to dispose of or not, will in a great degree depend on the size of the farms ; but in either case the country will have attained the limit of its productive powers under the actual circumstances in which the agriculture is carried on.
But a country which also abounds in manufacturing industry may continue to extend its productive powers far beyond the limits of its agricultural produce. Part of the agricultural produce will be food, but when the producible amount of food has reached its limit, the productive power of manufactures has not reached its limit also; and this makes a real distinction be tween agriculture and manufactures. Great Britain, for instance, might not be able to raise more food than is sufficient for its actual population, but Great Britain could supply the world with cotton cloth and hardware. A country of any considerable extent with a fair propor tion of good soil will always be to a considerable extent an agricultural coun try, for, under equal circumstances of taxation with other countries, it will always be as profitable to cultivate the good lands of such country as to import foreign grain, the price of which is in creased by the cost of carriage and con tingent expenses. But a time will come
in all countries which contain a large population not employed in agriculture, when foreign grain can be imported and sold at a lower price than grain can be produced on poor soils ; and if there is no restriction placed on the importation of rain, experience will soon show when it is more profitable to buy what is wanted to supply the deficiency of the home produce than to attempt to raise the whole that is wanted by cultivating poor soils. No country of large extent with a great population could obtain the whole supply of corn by foreign com merce ; such an instance is not on record. But a manufacturing country which has up to a certain point produced all the food that is required for its population, will be stopped short in the development of its manufacturing power if from any cause whatever it cannot obtain an in creased supply of food. An increased supply of food and an increased supply of raw produce are the two essential con ditions, without which the manufacturing industry of a country is ultimately limited by its power to produce food. If the in creased supply of food can be obtained from foreign countries, it is a matter of indifference to all who consume the food where it comes from ; and the agricul turist himself, as far as he is a consumer of food, is benefited with the rest of the community by the greater abundance of food caused by the foreign supply and by the increased productive powers of the manufacturer. It is not necessary to de termine how the increased supply of food will operate on wages or on profits, or on both : it is enough to show, that a time must come when there can be no increase in manufacturing power, if the supply of food is limited to what the country pro duces ; and by an addition to the supply of food an additional power is given to wards the production of those articles which have reached their limit because the supply of food cannot be increased.
A country which has already produced from its best and its second-rate soils as much as these soils can produce in the actual state of Agriculture, will begin to import grain from other countries, if there are no restrictions on importation. For capital will be more profitably employed in buying and importing foreign corn from countries where it is abundant than in raising it at great cost from inferior soils at home. It is generally assumed that the country which exports grain will take manufactured articles in exchange, and if there are no restrictions on either side this must be the case ; for the manufac turing country does not want the grain more than the agricultural country wants the manufactures. But it might happen that a country which had a very large internal and foreign trade would find it much cheaper to buy annually from grain growing countries all the corn that is wanted to supply its deficient produce at home, than to attempt to supply the de ficiency, or to add to the present stock of food by cultivating very poor soils; and this, even if the grain-growing country should refuse to take a single article of manufactures. The only way, indeed, of actually testing the truth of such a case as this is by experiment ; but if com merce were free from all restraint, the importation of grain would become a steady trade, the amount of which would be regulated by the condition of Agri culture in the importing country. If the importing country had brought all the better soils into cultivation, the amount of foreign grain that could pro fitably be introduced would depend on the productive powers of the exporting coun try and of the cost of transport. Any improvement in the Agriculture and in ternal communications of the importing country would tend to check importation : increase of population would tend to in crease it. The limit of profitable corn cultivation in the importing country, under its actual circumstances, would be determined by the cost of production in the exporting country, and the cost of transport. The Agriculture of the im porting country and of the exporting country would then both be free, so far as restrictions on their commerce are con cerned, and the consequence of this com petition must be favourable to apiculture in both. The profits of the agriculturists in both countries would be always the same or nearly the same as the average rate of all profits in the two several coun tries; and the profits of the agriculturist of the importing country would not be affected by the profits of the agriculturist of the exporting country, any more than the profits of any other class of persona would be affected.