ends on demand and supply. In the case of the rent of
land the same thing might have been said, but here such a statement
was not mentally satisfying, and investigators tried to ascertain why
demand and supply so act as to fix the income that land yields at a
certain definable amount.

_The Traditional Formula for Rent._--The formula which has long been
accepted as measuring the rent of a piece of land, though it bears the
name of Ricardo, grew into shape under the hands of several earlier
writers. In its best form of statement this principle asserts that
"the rent of a piece of land is the product that can be realized by
applying labor and capital to it, minus the product that can be
realized by applying the same amount of labor and capital to land of
the poorest grade that is in cultivation at all." The quantity of the
poorest land must be left indefinite, and all that the given amount of
labor and capital can economically utilize must be left at their
disposal. It would not do to say that the rent of _an acre_ of good
land equals its product less that of _an acre_ of the poorest land in
cultivation tilled with the same expenditure of labor and capital. If
we should select a bit of wheat land in England tilled at a large
outlay in the way of work, fertilizers, drains, etc., and try the
experiment of putting the same amount of labor and capital on a piece
of equal size in the remotest part of Canada, we should find that, so
far from securing wheat enough to pay the bills that we should incur
in the way of wages and interest, we should not have enough to help us
greatly in the defraying of these costs, and the cultivation of this
piece of land would be a losing venture. Instead of being no-rent
land, yielding merely wages and interest for the labor and capital
used in connection with it, it would be minus-rent land, deducting
something from the earnings which the agents combined with it might
elsewhere secure. In order to utilize such land at all, one must till
it in what is termed an extensive rather than an intensive way,
putting a small amount rather than a large amount of work and
expenditure on it. By tilling ten acres of a remote and sterile farm
with as much labor and other outlay as a very good acre of land in
England receives, one can perhaps get enough to pay the required wages
and interest. In general no-rent land is commonly utilized in an
extensive way and very good land in an intensive way; and in stating