Through the whole progress of society, he says, profits are regulated by the difficulty or facility of procuring food; and, “if the smallness of profits do not check accumulation, there are hardly any limits to the rise of rent and the fall of profit.” Nothing can increase the general rate of profit but the cheapening of food;[547] as by improvements in agriculture, which, by securing the same production with less labour, for the time increase the profits and lower the rents.[548] The landlord’s interest is therefore at all times opposed to that of every other class in the community,[549] for it means dear food, low profits, and high rents. Still, high rents are not the cause either of the dear food or the low profits, but are, equally with them, the effect of a common cause, more costly cultivation. The effect of a costly cultivation on wages might seem _vi terminorum_ to be a raising of them, for wages depend on the proportion of the supply of labourers to capital’s demand[550] for them, and by assumption there was a greater demand. But since the cause of the rise of price was in the first instance an increase of population, it follows that the increased cost of raising the most costly supplies of corn will be incurred not by higher payment of old labourers, but by employment of new. Wages again will buy less corn, for corn has risen. “While the price of corn rises ten per cent., wages will always rise less than ten per cent., but rent will always rise more; the condition of the labourer will generally decline, and that of the landlord will always be improved.”[551] In his statement of the doctrine of wages, Ricardo is perhaps more careful in 1815 than he is in 1817, saying that, “as experience demonstrates that capital and population alternately take the lead, and wages in consequence are liberal or scanty, nothing can be positively laid down respecting profits as far as wages are concerned.”[552] But even in 1817 his exposition is hardly more rigid than that of Malthus himself. So far is he from recognizing an iron law driving wages down to “the natural price” or bare necessaries, that he thinks the market rate may be constantly above the natural for an indefinite period, and he regards the natural itself as expansive. The whole chapter on wages[553] shows a just understanding of the _Essay on Population_. Nevertheless, if Ricardo in one sense made too much of the principle of population in relation to Rent, in another sense he made too little of it. He does not see that in a progressive country it counteracts the tendency of improvements in agriculture to cheapen produce, and thereby reduce rents;[554] agricultural rents have risen since 1846 largely because of high farming. He does not grant that high or low wages can affect rent, because he regards them as purely relative to profits, and making with profits a total amount, of which only the proportions vary; but it is