It will be true that the farmer requires the ordinary rate of profit on the whole of his capital; that whatever it returns to him beyond this he is obliged to pay to the landlord, but will not consent to pay more; that there is a portion of capital applied to agriculture in such circumstances of productiveness as to yield only the ordinary profits; and that the difference between the produce of this and of any other capital of similar amount is the measure of the tribute which that other capital can and will pay, under the name of rent, to the landlord. This constitutes a law of rent, as near the truth as such a law can possibly be; though of course modified or disturbed, in individual cases, by pending contracts, individual miscalculations, the influence of habit, and even the particular feelings and dispositions of the persons concerned. The law of rent, in the economic sense, operates in the United States as truly as elsewhere, although there is no separate class of landlords here. With us, almost all land is owned by the cultivator; so that two functions, those of the landlord and farmer, are both united in one person. Although one payment is made, it is still just as distinctly made up of two parts, one of which is a payment to the owner for the superior quality of his soil, and the other a payment (to the same person, if the owner is the cultivator) of profit on the farmer’s working capital. Land which in the United States will only return enough to pay a profit on this capital can not pay any rent. And land which can pay more than a profit on this working capital, returns that excess as rent, even if the farmer is also the owner and landlord. The principle which regulates the amount of that excess—which is the essential point—is the principle which determines the amount of economic rent, and it holds true in the United States or Finland, provided only that different grades of land are called into cultivation. The governing principle is the same, no matter whether a payment is made to one man as profit and to another as rent, or whether the two payments are made to the same man in two capacities. It has been urged that the law of rent does not hold in the United States, because “the price of grain and other agricultural produce has not risen in proportion to the increase of our numbers, as it ought to have done if Ricardo’s theory were true, but has fallen, since 1830, though since that time our population has been more than tripled.”(181) This overlooks the fact that we have not even yet taken up all our best agricultural lands, so that for some products the law of diminishing productiveness has not yet shown itself. The reason is, that the extension of our railway system has only of late years brought the really good grain-lands into cultivation. The fact that there has