ART. IV.-An Essay on the Distribution of Wealth and the Sources of Taxation. By the Rev. Richard Jones, A.M. of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. London. 1831.

THIS

HIS work is the first systematic attempt that has been made to pursue the inquiry into the production and distribution of wealth upon the Baconian principle of cautious induction from an extended range of observations. The first book, which alone has at present appeared, is occupied by a dissertation on rent. The remaining books, we are told, will be devoted to the examination, in a similar manner, of the other main channels into which wealth distributes itself, namely, wages, profits, and taxation. In the glimpses which the author affords, in the preface to his present volume, of the conclusions at which he has arrived on these different subjects by a close process of induction from a wide survey of facts, we are pleased to perceive that they will be found to coincide almost wholly with our own views, as they were developed, with unavoidable brevity, in January last.*

Our opinions, as there given, upon rent, the subject matter of the volume we have now in review, agree likewise very closely with those which Mr. Jones has deduced from an examination of the nature of the tenure and occupation of land throughout the known and cultivated regions of the globe. He has dealt the finishingstroke to the miserable theory of rent' of the Ricardo school of economists, which declares what they call the decreasing fertility of soils to be the sole cause of rent, and the cause, at the same time, of a progressive reduction in the profits of capital and the wages of labour (that is, of the share of wealth which falls to every other class of society than the landlords), ' of such magnitude and

power as finally to overwhelm every other,'t-to be, in fact, a great law of nature, from whose all-pervading influence the utmost efforts of human ingenuity cannot enable man to escape,' and which is sure in the long run to overmatch all the improvements that may occur in machinery or agriculture.' § Upon this theory,

*Since the article here alluded to was printed, Mr. Senior's 'Three Lectures on the Rate of Wages' issued from the press, and we were gratified to find this able writer completely agreeing with us on several of the points in which we ventured to differ most widely from the prevailing opinions; as, for instance, on the doctrine of absenteeism-the limitation of the principle of free trade-the separation of national wealth from national welfare-and the paramount importance of a sufficiency of food to all other considerations. We mention this not for the foolish purpose of establishing a claim to the original discovery of these principles, but as exhibiting a pleasing instance of independent thinkers arriving at the same conclusions at the same time, though in complete opposition to the current and accredited notions. The confirmation thus afforded to a chain of reasoning is greater than that derived from the subsequent assent of thousands.

+ Malthus, Principles of Political Economy, p. 317. M'Culloch, Principles, &c. p. 488, last ed. VOL. XLVI, NO. XCI.

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§ Idem. p. 489.

narrow,

narrow, vague, and visionary as it is, suggested by a contracted view of an exceedingly limited class of facts, contradicting the experience of almost every country in the world, and opposed to the most obvious theoretical considerations, a whole system was, in truth, founded of hypothetical maxims relative to the great subjects of wages, profits, and taxation, as well as rent; and, dignified by the title of political economy, has been for some years past referred to in the senate and the council-chamber as the oracle of statesmen and the text-book of legislators!

The task of destroying this false and pernicious theory, and of establishing the true character of rent, and its real bearings upon the interests of the classes who are not possessed of property in land, has been accomplished by Mr. Jones with a fulness of research which scarcely leaves anything to be desired, and with a novelty in his mode of treating the subject which renders his work one of the most valuable contributions to the study of human welfare, perhaps the most valuable that we have had since the immortal essay of Adam Smith. He is the first writer we are acquainted with who has drawn the attention of the public to the striking fact of the immense importance, with regard to the social and economical condition of any division of the human race, of the laws and customs that prevail among them respecting the occupation of land, and the share of its produce received or claimed by the landowners. There is no exaggeration in the assertion that it is by these circumstances almost alone that the position of any nation in the scale of civilization is practically determined. Nor can any one be surprised that the fact is so, when he adverts to the simple consideration that it is from the land, and the land alone, that nations derive as well the whole of the food on which they are supported, as the raw materials out of which, by the exertion of their industry and ingenuity, they elaborate all the other necessaries, comforts, and luxuries of life; that, therefore, the class who are possessed, no matter how or why, of the exclusive property of the land, have it in their power, by the more or less easy and equitable terms upon which they choose to admit of its cultivation, either to restrain production of every kind within the narrowest limits, or to permit its full development to the utmost extent of which human industry is capable.

The terms which circumstances have in practice led the owners of the soil to make with its cultivators, vary very materially in different parts of the globe; and a review of these different customs, and of their effects, during an experience of ages, as unfolded to us in history and from recent observation, by exhibiting their respective merits and defects, and the influence they severally exercise over the moral, economical, and political condition of the inhabitants

inhabitants of the countries in which they prevail, must, it is evident, offer one of the most instructive subjects of contemplation to the philanthropist and statesman, and form the first, and perhaps the most important division of the whole field of inquiry which is subjected to the social economist.

Will it be credited that this paramount inquiry is, as yet, unentered upon by those who have hitherto exclusively arrogated to themselves the title of political economists?-that in their pretended investigations of the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, they have omitted all research into the determining circumstances of that process which is the sole fountain of all wealth, namely, the cultivation of land? This, however, is the fact, almost to the letter; for the attention which has been hitherto given by them to the rent of land, (and which had been better omitted altogether than treated as they have treated it,) confined itself to an almost insignificant fraction of the subject to what is, in fact, but an inconsiderable part of the rent of land in one country only, itself but a very inconsiderable portion (not a hundredth part) of the cultivated earth!

The cause of this almost inconceivable blindness is to be looked for in their habitual practice of setting off from some imaginary à priori assumption, without troubling themselves with observation or history. Acting upon this system, they have chosen to take it for granted that all lands were originally open to the appropriation of those who were willing to bestow pains on their cultivation; and, consequently, that no rent could be, in any case, paid or demanded for land until the whole of the best soils within reach were already cultivated, and the increase of population made it necessary to resort to soils of inferior quality, upon. which the first would rise in value, and enable their owners to demand a rent equal to the difference between their produce and that of the latter soils, when cultivated at the same expense.

We will not stop to correct this statement of the causes of that portion of the rent of land which does, in fact, arise as cultivation spreads over inferior soils; we shall have another opportunity of proving the complete fallacy of the doctrine of the Economists on this point, and indeed we have already done so on a former occasion. But Mr. Jones very properly demurs to their proposition in limine, or rather to the postulate on which it proceeds; and, pursuing his more legitimate system of inductive reasoning from a comprehensive survey of facts, looks to the various nations which have cultivated land, and finds that in no one of them have the circumstances, supposed by the Ricardo theorists to be universal, ever existed. In all periods of the history of all countries, an exclusive property in the soil has been claimed by, and allowed to, some

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parties,

parties, a claim apparently originating, in almost every case, in the supposed right of conquest. Sometimes, as throughout Asia, the sovereigns have reserved to themselves the ownership of the whole soil of their dominions, and the cultivators are universally the immediate tenants of the throne. In modern Europe, the right which originally likewise vested in the sovereign, was imparted by him, under more or less of restriction as to tenure, to subordinate chiefs, military leaders, or favourites. In America, both North and South, the state still assumes the exclusive title to all uncultivated land, and forbids its appropriation except on specific terms. If there ever existed a people among whom the land was free to all, it was only where the state of society was such as to render land worthless, as among the wandering tribes of New South Wales, though, even there, it is probable that the hunting-grounds are appropriated as we know them to be in North America. As soon as land came to be of any value, it has been always seized by the powerful, and dealt out to those that were in want of it on the dearest terms that could be made by its lords. The natural right of every individual to a share of the common earth on which God has placed him (the people's farm, as it is sometimes called) has never been practically acknowledged, insisted on, or enjoyed by any people.

On the contrary, there has always, and in every country, existed, as we have seen, on the one hand, a party exercising an exclusive de facto property in the land; on the other, the bulk of the people, who must obtain leave to cultivate it or starve. The terms on which they acquire this permission from the proprietors constitute what is called its rent. Mr. Jones distinguishes two principal classes of rents; those paid by the labourer who extracts his own wages from the earth, and which he calls peasant-rents, and those which, in a more advanced stage of society, are paid by farmers, or capitalists employing labourers under them. He considers that ninety-nine hundredths of the cultivated surface of the globe are tilled by peasants directly responsible for rent to the landowner; and that the system of cultivation by capitalists is confined to a very minute district, consisting only of England, the Netherlands, and a very small part of France. It is this system, notwithstanding, which has monopolized the attention of the inquirers into the nature of rent, though they are far indeed from having fathomed its true character, even in that limited sense.

Though the contracts entered into with the owners of the soil by its peasant cultivators are infinitely varied in detail, they yet class themselves very decidedly into four great divisions, called, by Mr. Jones, labour, métayer, ryot, and cottier rents. The three first are found occupying, in contiguous masses, the whole breadth

of

of the old world, from the Canary Islands to the shores of China and the Pacific, and deciding, each in its own sphere, not merely the economical relations of the landlords and tenants, but the political and social condition of the mass of the people. The cottier rents, being money-rents paid by peasant-occupiers, are almost confined to Ireland and parts of Scotland.

In the ordinary form of occupation by labour (service) or serfrent, the peasant is permitted to cultivate a certain portion of ground for his own subsistence, on condition of performing sometimes a fixed, sometimes an indefinite quantity of labour on the remainder of the estate which is retained in the hands of the proprietor, and the produce of which forms his revenue. This system, which was once universal throughout the north of Europe (not excepting, of course, England), still prevails in all the countries east of the Rhine, though more or less modified in some, and particularly in those which approach nearest to that river. In Russia it yet exists in its unmitigated form, and accompanied by that which was perhaps everywhere its original attendant-the complete personal slavery of the peasant. The attempts that have been made of late years, with partial and imperfect success, in Germany, Hungary, Poland, and even in Russia, by the policy and humanity of the nobles or sovereign, to substitute a better form of tenancy, and to communicate freedom, and with it the industry and spirit of improvement which freedom alone can impart to the cultivator, are detailed in an exceedingly interesting chapter in Mr. Jones's work, to which we can only refer our readers. The progress of the change, as it has taken place in the west of Europe, may be illustrated from the example of England. During the Saxon æra, serfship and the system of labour-rents were universal. Even at the end of the thirteenth century, two hundred years after the occupation of the country by the Normans, a very large proportion of the body of cultivators was still precisely in the situation of the Russian serf. During the next three hundred years, the unlimited labour-rents paid by the villeins for the lands allotted to them, were gradually commuted for definite services, still payable in kind, and they had a legal right to the hereditary occupation of their copyholds. Two hundred years have barely elapsed since the change to this extent became quite universal, or since the personal bondage of the villeins ceased to exist among us. The last claim of villeinage recorded in our courts was in the 15th of James I. 1618. Instances probably existed some time after this. The ultimate cessation of the right to demand their stipulated services in kind has been since brought about silently and imperceptibly, not by positive law, for, when other personal services were abolished at

the