difficult to believe that the rise in agricultural wages since 1873 or so can have failed to play a part in keeping down farmers’ rents since that date. As, however, our view of the power or powerlessness of lowered profits or lowered wages to increase rent will be found to depend on our view of the causes of value, and as the difference of the two economists on the relation of wages to profits might have the appearance of a technical subtlety, these two items of the total may be passed by for the present. In regard to agricultural improvements the issue seemed plainer, and the evidence seemed all for Ricardo and against Malthus. In a country depending chiefly on itself for grain, a general adoption of improvements would seem to make supplies cheaper because less costly, and therefore to lower rents because forcing farmers to lower prices. Even Mr. Mill did not break away from Ricardianism at this point,[555] though he speaks less unreservedly than Ricardo upon it. Malthus, on the other hand, who regards rent as depending largely on the ability of the agricultural supply to create its own demands, regards rent, accordingly, as at all times keeping pace with the increase of grain caused by improvements, unless the improvements outrun population. What cheapness does in other cases is to make an article accessible to a circle of buyers previously excluded from it. Every one is a buyer of agricultural produce and no one is excluded; but the temporary cheapness of grain creates new buyers by making marriage accessible to a wider circle. The progress of rents in fact results from the conflict of two economical tendencies—the tendency of economical expedients to lower prices, and the tendency of an increasing population to raise them. If Malthus’ ripest view of population be true, then a cheapening of food among a civilized people by no means leads to a corresponding increase of their numbers, and therefore the course of improvement would tend so far towards a diminution of price, and therewith of rent. If rents depended on the price of corn alone, economical expedients (including not only the direct aids to tillage, mechanical and chemical inventions directly applied to it, but the indirect aids, free trade, railways, and steamers) must certainly have lowered rents in the last hundred years. But the reverse is true,[556] chiefly because the produce of a farm is ceasing to mean wheat, and coming more and more to mean cattle and dairy produce, which have not fallen but risen in price in one hundred years, while corn has actually fallen. This variety of productions has proved financially an equivalent to what Malthus (seventy years ago) considered the main cause of greater extra profits to the farmer and greater money rents to the landlord——the increased fertility of the soil in the matter of grain, and an increased price keeping pace with it.