◆¹ Now a British tenant-farmer who lives solely by his farming obviously derives his whole income from the produce of the soil he occupies; but the whole of this produce does not go to himself. Part is paid away in the form of rent to his landlord, and part in the form of wages to his labourers. We may however suppose, without altering the situation, that he has no labourers under him—that he is his own labourer as well as his own manager, and that the whole of the produce that is not set aside as rent goes to himself as the wages of his own exertion. The point on which I am going to insist is this—that whilst the exertion has produced the product that is taken as wages, the soil—or to speak more accurately—a certain quality in the soil has just as truly produced the produce that goes in rent—in fact that “Nature and Labour, though equally necessary for producing the effect at all,” each produce respectively a certain definite part of it. [Sidenote ◆1 As will be shown in this chapter by reference to the universally accepted theory of Rent.] ◆¹ In order to prove this it will be enough to make really clear to the reader the explanation of rent which is given by all economists—an explanation in which men of the most opposite schools agree—men like Ricardo, and men like Mr. Henry George; and of which Mill himself is one of the most illustrious exponents. I shall myself attempt to add nothing new to it, except a greater simplicity of statement and illustration, and a special stress on a certain part of its meaning, the importance of which has been hitherto disregarded. Now, as we are going to take the industry of agriculture for our example, we shall mean by rent a portion of the agricultural products derived from Human Exertion applied to a given tract of soil. Of such products let us take corn, and use it, for simplicity’s sake, as representing all the rest; and that being settled, let us go yet a step further; and, for simplicity’s sake also, let us represent corn by bread; and imagine that loaves develop themselves in the soil like potatoes, and, when the ground is properly tilled, are dug up ready for consumption. We shall figure rent therefore as a certain number of loaves that are dug up from a given tract of soil. Now everybody knows that all soils are not equally good. That there is good land and that there is poor land is a fact quite familiar even to people who have never spent a single day in the country. And this means, if we continue the above supposition, that different fields of precisely the same size, cultivated by similar men and with the same expenditure of exertion, will yield to their respective cultivators different numbers of loaves. [Sidenote ◆1 We will illustrate this by the case of three men of equal power tilling three fields of unequal fertility.]