Stuart Mill[2] says that “the rent of land consists of the excess of its return above the return to the worst land in cultivation.” Fawcett[3] says that “the rent of land represents the pecuniary value of the advantages which such land possesses over the worst land in cultivation.” Professor Marshall[4] says that “the rent of a piece of land is the excess of its produce over the produce of an adjacent piece of land which would not be cultivated at all if rent were paid for it.” Professor Sidgwick[5] cautiously puts it that “the normal rent _per acre_ of any piece” [of land] “is the surplus of the value of its produce over the value of the net produce per acre of the least advantageous land that it is profitable to cultivate.” General Walker[6] declares that “specifically, the rent of any piece of land is determined by the difference between its annual yield and that of the least productive land actually cultivated for the supply of the same market, it being assumed that the quality of the land as a productive agent is, in neither case, impaired or improved by such cultivation.” All these definitions are offered by the authors as elaborations of that given by their master Ricardo,[7] who says, “Rent is that portion of the produce of the earth which is paid to the landlord for the use of the original and indestructible powers of the soil.” THE COUNTY FAMILY. Let us return to our ideal country. Adam is retiring from productive industry on £500 a year; and his neighbors are hastening to imitate him as fresh tenants present themselves. The first result is the beginning of a tradition that the oldest families in the country enjoy a superior position to the rest, and that the main advantage of their superior position is that they enjoy incomes without working. Nevertheless, since they still depend on their tenants’ labor for their subsistence, they continue to pay Labor, with a capital L, a certain meed of mouth honor; and the resultant association of prosperity with idleness, and praise with industry, practically destroys morality by setting up that incompatibility between conduct and principle which is the secret of the ingrained cynicism of our own time, and which produces the curious Ricardian phenomenon of the man of business who goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.