in
a country in which direct employers of labor were not, as a rule, the
owners of much land. Farmers, merchants, and many manufacturers hired
land and furnished only the auxiliary capital which was necessary in
order to utilize it. In a practical way the earnings of land were thus
separated from those of capital in other forms, since they went to a
different class of persons; and in the thought of the people the
charges made for the use of mere ground came to constitute a unique
kind of income. If, during the last century, the land in England had
been a highly mercantile commodity, and if it had been the common
practice of _entrepreneurs_ not to hire it but to buy and own it, as
they bought and owned all other industrial instruments, there is
little probability that land would have been considered, either in
practical thought or in science, as a thing to be as broadly
distinguished as it has been from all other capital goods. A business
man would have measured his permanent fund of capital in pounds
sterling and would have included in the amount whatever he had
invested in land. As in America any representation of the capital of a
corporation includes the sums invested in every productive way, and
this includes the value of all land that the company holds, so in
England, under a similar system of conducting business, any statement
of the amount of a particular business capital would have included the
whole of the productive wealth embarked in the enterprise; and in any
statement of the forms of it there would have appeared, besides a list
of all tools, buildings, unfinished goods, and the like, a schedule of
the prices of land that the company owned and used. In "putting
capital into his business" a man might buy land, in "withdrawing his
capital" he might sell it; and the land in the interim would be the
obvious embodiment of this part of his fund. The fact, then, that land
was owned by one class of persons and let to another for hire, and
that the lessees were the _entrepreneurs_ or users of it, caused
practical thought and speech to put land in a class by itself.

_The Origin of the Theory of Rent._--Scientific thought powerfully
strengthened this tendency. At a very early date a formula was
attained for measuring the rent of land, while no satisfactory formula
was, then or for a long time afterward, discovered for measuring the
amount of interest. Men contented themselves with saying that the rate
of interest dep