In a word, these no-rent pieces of land, no-profit-producing machines, no-profit-earning labourers, have no economic existence at all; and if they happen to be actually on the wheel - as in the case of a patch or patches of worthless land lying among the good acres, but not detachable from them; or an old and worn-out machine, kept going to enable capable workmen to earn their bare wages by its use in periods of transition or when work is slack; or of labourers who just earn their wages, and are kept on as a charity, or what not - they are really not on it as economic entities, and so do not count; in a word, they do not form part of the subject-matter of Political Economy, or its laws. Now, if we bear these points in mind, two important conclusions will be seen to follow; - the first is, that in any organic or organised product made up of the play and interaction of different organs or factors, no one of these can for purposes of analysis or investigation be suppressed, or reduced to zero, but all alike must be held to have positive values.

Otherwise you would have such unnatural phenomena as trees growing into the sky when you suppressed the organic factors that imposed on them limitation, measure, and proportion; or men with bodies and no heads, or with stomachs and livers but no hearts; or perpetual-motion machines that would go on for ever, etc. - impossibilities all, which in the world of Nature do not, and cannot exist; the fallacy of the method lying in not seeing that some definite positive amount of each factor, however small, must exist in every instance; and that you have no alternative but either to make all the factors that enter into the product, zero, - in which case the product ceases to exist, - or to give them all alike a definite positive value. And this fallacy, as we shall see, pervades the whole of the orthodox and academical economists' treatment of the problem of Rent. And the consequences of this, again, are two, first, that there being no such thing, economically speaking, as a margin of cultivation ' or land paying no rent, a 'margin of capital' or capital paying no profits, a 'marginal labourer' or a labourer not earning for his master more than his wages, it follows either that all Rent, all Profits, and all Labour, enter into the price of their united product, or that none of them do.

The academical economists have unanimously agreed that all alike, Land, Labour, and Capital, enter into the product, but that only two of them, the profits of Capital and the wages of Labour, enter into the price, - Rent being excluded. And we have now to ask, what is the source of the fallacy by which this anomaly of the exclusion of Rent, so contrary to the natural opinion of every business man, has found its way into the orthodox science of Political Economy.

To begin with, then, I imagine it took its rise in the mere fact of the existence of a special class of men, the landlords, who doing nothing, were able to draw to themselves while they slept as it were, large slices of the produce of industry; the instrument by which this was done, the Land, being so simple and uncomplicated, so separate from either machinery or labour, that it seemed as if it might be quite legitimately detached from the other factors of industry, Capital and Labour, as a thing that could be set aside in a niche by itself and be reduced to some simple law; after which, it would be easier to determine the shares of the remainder, when uncomplicated by Rent, that would fall to Capital and Labour respectively. And it was to find some way of determining not only the definite share of the produce of industry that would fall to Rent, but also the cause of the difference of rents between one landlord and another, that some accurate instrument of measurement was required. And as all instruments of measurement, - even a two-foot-rule or a tape measure, - must begin with nought or zero, so, too, it was in the measurement of the differential rents of land, which could only be accurately compared if all alike started from some real or imaginary no-rent land.

And hence it was that the conception of a 'margin of cultivation,' or no-rent land, found its way into the science of Political Economy. But no sooner had it made its entrance as a mere instrument of calculation, than it speedily gave rise to the illusion that there was such a no-rent land on the 'margin of cultivation' in actual economic use, besides strengthening the illusion with which its authors had set out, namely that Land, as one of the instruments of production, could be detached from the other instruments of production and subjected to economic measurement by itself, and without reference to any action it might have on Capital and Labour, or they on it, when the price of the product of their united services had to be redistributed among the landlords, capitalists, and wage-earners, respectively, as payment for these services.

At that time no one had thought of detaching Capital and Labour from each other, in the same way as they had detached the Land from both the Capital and the Labour, and subjecting them to the same mode of measurement by means of a real or imaginary zero of no-profit capital, and no-wage-earning labour.

And the reason of this was, that it was generally felt that Capital and Labour were too intimately bound up together, and that they varied too much in relation to each other to be separated and independently estimated, just as we can imagine a man's hair to be cut off as a superfluity, and estimated independently of the rest of the body, in a way not possible with the heart or the liver. Besides, the very conception of an employer using a machine that brought in no profit, or a labourer who only earned his wages, would have seemed such an anomaly that it did not occur to them as possible. It is true that Ricardo at this time had got the wage of the labourer down to a ' bare subsistence wage,' but then that affected the capitalist, whose profits were correspondingly increased. It is true, also, that Ricardo and Mill had fixed the no-rent land or the 'margin of cultivation ' at the point where Capital and Labour received just the current rate of profits and wages, and no more; so that if the usual rate of farmers' profits stood at