CHAPTER II..

THE FERTILITY OF LAND.

Land.

§ 1. THE requisites of production are commonly spoken of as land, labour and capital: those material things which owe their usefulness to human labour being classed under capital, and those which owe nothing to it being classed as land. The distinction is obviously a loose one: for bricks are but pieces of earth slightly worked up; and the soil of old settled countries has for the greater part been worked over many times by man, and owes to him its present form. There is however a scientific principle underlying the distinction. While man has no power of creating matter, he creates utilities by putting things into a useful form1; and the utilities made by him can be increased in supply if there is an increased demand for them: they have a supply price. But there are other utilities over the supply of which he has no control, they are given as a fixed quantity by nature and have therefore no supply price. The term "land" has been extended by economists so as to include the permanent sources of these utilities2; whether they are found in land, as the term is commonly used, or in seas and rivers, in sunshine and rain, in winds and waterfalls.

When we have inquired what it is that marks off land from those material things which we regard as products of the land, we shall find that the fundamental attribute of land is its extension. The right to use a piece of land gives

1 See Book II. Chapter iii.

2 In Ricardo's famous phrase "the original or indestructible properties of the soil."

command over a certain space- a certain part of the earth's surface. The area of the earth is fixed: the geometric relations in which any particular part of it stands to other parts are fixed. Man has no control over them; they are wholly unaffected by demand; they have no cost of production, there is no supply price at which they can be produced. The use of a certain area of the earth's surface is a primary condition of anything that man can do; it gives him room for his own actions, with the enjoyment of the heat and the light, the air and the rain which nature assigns to that area; and it determines his distance from, and in a great measure his relations to, other things and other persons.

Some parts of the earth's surface contribute to production chiefly by the services which they render to the navigator: others are of chief value to the miner; others-though this selection is made by man rather than by nature to the builder. But when the productiveness of land is spoken of our first thoughts turn to its agricultural use.

§ 2. To the agriculturist an area of land is the means of supporting a certain amount of vegetable, and perhaps ultimately of animal life. For this purpose the soil must have certain mechanical and chemical qualities.

Conditions

chanical

of

Mechanically, it must be so far yielding that the fine roots of plants can push their way freely in it; and fertility, me- yet it must be firm enough to give them a good hold. The action of fresh air and water and of frosts are nature's tillage of the soil; but man gives great aid in this mechanical preparation of the soil. The chief purpose of his tillage is to enable the soil to hold plant roots gently but firmly, and to enable the air and water to move about freely in it. Even when he manures the ground he has this mechanical preparation in view. For farmyard manure benefits clay soils by subdividing them and making them lighter and more open, no less than by enriching them chemically; while to sandy soils it gives a much needed

firmness of texture, and helps them, mechanically as well as chemically, to hold the materials of plant food which would otherwise be quickly washed out of them.

Chemically the soil must have the inorganic elements that the plant wants in a form palatable to it. The and chemical. greater part of the bulk of the plant is made up

of so-called "organic compounds"; that is, compounds of carbon chiefly with oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen; and of these it obtains by far the greater part from air and water. Only a small fraction (somewhere about a twentieth on an average) of its dry bulk consists of mineral matter that it cannot get except from the soil. And as most soils have given them by nature at least some small quantities of all the mineral substances that are necessary for plant life, they can support some sort of vegetation without human aid. Often however they have but very scanty provision of one or two necessary elements; and then man can turn a barren into a very fertile soil by adding a small quantity of just those things that are needed; using in most cases either lime in some of its many forms, or those artificial manures which modern chemical science has provided in great variety.

Man's power

the soil.

By these means the fertility of the soil can be brought under man's control. He can by sufficient labour make almost any land bear large crops. He can of altering the prepare the soil mechanically and chemically for character of whatever crops he intends to grow next. He can adapt his crops to the nature of the soil and to one another; selecting such a rotation that each will leave the land in such a state, and at such a time of year, that it can be worked up easily and without loss of time into a suitable seed bed for the coming crop. He can even permanently alter the nature of the soil by draining it, or by mixing with it other soil that will supplement its deficiencies.

All these changes are likely to be carried out more extensively and thoroughly in the future than in the past. But

even now the greater part of the soil in old countries owes much of its character to human action; all that lies just below the surface has in it a large element of capital, the produce of man's past labour: the inherent, or indestructible, properties of the soil, the free gifts of nature, have been largely modified; partly robbed and partly added to by the work of many generations of men.

But it is different with that which is above the surface. Every acre has given to it by nature an annual income of heat and light, of air and moisture; and over these man has but little control. He may indeed alter the climate a little by extensive drainage works or by planting forests, or cutting them down. But, on the whole, the action of the sun and the wind and the rain are an annuity fixed by nature for each plot of land. Ownership of the land gives possession of this annuity and it also gives the space required for the life and action of vegetables and animals; the value of this space being much affected by its geographical position.

:

Original and artificial pro

perties of land.

We may then continue to use the ordinary distinction between the original or inherent properties, which the land derives from nature, and the artificial properties which it owes to human action; provided we remember that the first include the space-relations of the plot in question, and the annuity that nature has given it of sunlight and air and rain; and that in many cases these are the chief of the inherent properties of the soil. It is chiefly from them that the ownership of agricultural land derives its peculiar significance, and the Theory of Rent its special character. But the question how far the fertility of any soil is due to the original properties given to it by nature, and how far to the changes in it made by man, cannot be fully discussed without taking account of the kind of produce raised from it1.

1 Principles IV. II. contains some further information as to the methods and results of high cultivation as applied to different soils and different crops.

CHAPTER III.

THE FERTILITY OF LAND, CONTINUED.

DIMINISHING RETURN.

THE LAW OF

§ 1. THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURN may be provisionally stated thus:

An increase in the capital and labour applied in the cultivation of land causes in general a less than Provisional proportionate increase in the amount of produce statement of raised, unless it happens to coincide with an Diminishing improvement in the arts of agriculture.

the Law of

Return.

We learn from history and by observation that every agriculturist in every age and clime desires to have the use of a good deal of land; and that when he cannot get it freely, he will pay for it, if he has the means. If he thought that he would get as good results by applying all his capital and labour to a very small piece, he would not pay for any but a very small piece.

When land that requires no clearing is to be had for nothing, every one uses just that quantity which he thinks will give his capital and labour the largest return. His cultivation is "extensive," not "intensive." He does not aim at getting many bushels of corn from any one acre, for then he would cultivate only a few acres. His purpose is to get as large a total crop as possible with a given It is based on expenditure of seed and labour; and therefore general expehe sows as many acres as he can manage to bring under a light cultivation. Of course he may go too far: he may spread his work over so large an area that he would gain by concentrating his capital and labour on a smaller

rience.