148

THE NATURE AND CAUSES 01'

to the price of their cattle. It is not more than a century agothat in many parts of the Highlands of Scotland , butcher’smeat was as cheap or cheaper than even bread made of oat-meal. The union opened the market of England to the high-land cattle. Their ordinary price is at present about threetimes greater than at the beginning of the century, and therents of many highland estates have been tripled and quad-rupled in the same time. In almost every part of Great Bri-tain a pound of the best butcher’s meat is, in the present times,generally worth mqre than two pounds of the best whitebread; and in plentiful years it is sometimes worth three orfour pounds.

It is thus that in the progress of improvement the rent andprofit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in somemeasure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and theseagain by the rent and profit of corn. Corn is an annual crop.Butcher ’s meat, a crop which requires four or five years togrow. As an acre of land, therefore, will produce a muchsmaller quantity of the one species of food than of the other,the inferiority of the quantity must be compensated by thesuperiority of the price. If it was more than compensated,more corn land would be turned into pasture; and if it wasnot compensated, part of what was in pasture would bebrought back into corn.

This equality, however, between the rent and profit of grassand those of corn; of the land of which the immediate pro-duce is food for cattle, and of that of which the immediateproduce is food for men; must be understood to take placeonly through the greater part of the improved lands of a greatcountry. In some particular local situations it is quite other-wise, and the rent and profit of grass are much superior towhat can be made by corn.

Thus in the neighbourhood of a great town, the demandfor milk and for forage to horses, frequently contribute, toge-ther with the high price of butcher’s meat, to raise the valueof grass above what may be called its natural proportion tothat of corn. This local advantage, it is evident, cannot becommunicated to the land at a distance.

Particular circumstances have sometimes rendered somecountries so populous, that the whole territory, like the landsin the neighbourhood of a great town, has not been sufficientto produce both the grass and the corn necessary for the sub-sistence of their inhabitants. Their lands, therefore, have