in Middlesex or Lancashire? The selection of such a standard was a purely illogical process; it confounded effect with cause. The forces which determine rent decree that such a farm cannot pay rent, that is an effect; but its paying no rent could be no cause, by the mere fact alone that it did not yield sufficient net profit, why other lands should pay no rent. The margin of calculation was framed at a particular locality, under its own circumstances, but it could say nothing about the circumstances of another farm and their effects. The moral to be derived from the examination of Ricardo and Mill's theories of rent is clear. The sooner that their margin of cultivation, their standard of the amount of rent, disappears, the better will it be for the interests of society and of Political Economy. It has driven away all agricultural audience from the talk of Political Economy about rent; it is felt to lie altogether outside of the practical world. Let the land which is cultivated without being able to pay rent be inquired into by all means, whenever there is a call for so doing. Let the impeding causes and all their circumstances be explored, but let the inquiry and its results be kept apart from all rent-paying land. The forces which determine that one farm can pay rent and another none are the same for both, either by their presence or their absence; but the two farms have no connection with each other, except as suffering effects from common causes. When this great truth is seen and acknowledged, and when Political Economy has ceased to talk of the non rent-paying land regulating the amount of all rent, the world which it addresses, and for whom it exists, will be won over to listen to its teaching on rent and to think it real. And now let us face the question, simply, What is rent? It is necessary to distinguish here between two different meanings of the word rent. It is a legal word, connected with the hire of land or forms of real property connected with land, as houses, rooms, and the like. Agricultural rent is different in nature from the rent of rooms. The rents paid for a house or rooms in a large building such as Gresham House have no relation to any particular business carried on in them, much less do they depend on the success of that business. Agricultural rent, on the contrary, is given for the very purpose of engaging in a distinct business, agriculture; and the profits of that business enter largely, in the settlement of rent, into the calculations of the lender and the hirer of the land. It is of agricultural rent exclusively that we are speaking on the present occasion.