ntry like Great Britain,
there are considerable tracts of land which it is unprofitable to
employ for any economic purpose whatsoever, and which possess no
further value than what the mere pride of ownership may give
them. This fact makes it possible to apply the conception of the
margin to the case of land with particularly illuminating results.

In the first place, however, it should be observed that the value of
any piece of land does not depend solely on the intrinsic fertility of
the soil. The fact that land is an immobile thing makes its
_situation_ a factor of great importance. In the case of urban land,
situation is, of course, the only thing that counts. The value of a
site in Bond Street or the City is entirely unaffected by its capacity
or incapacity for potato-growing purposes. But even for agricultural
land, situation is a most important matter. A farm, which is so remote
that considerable transport charges must be incurred to bring its
produce to market, will be less sought after, and less valuable, than
one which is much better situated though somewhat less fertile. In
what follows, therefore, we must speak of the "quality" of a piece of
land in a broad sense to include advantages of situation, as well as
of fertility. Let us now, imagine the different pieces of land in
Great Britain to be arranged in order of quality, so that we have a
long series, with land of the best quality at one end, and of the
poorest quality at the other. At the latter end, we will have such
land as is found near the top of Snowden or Ben Nevis, which it
clearly does not pay to cultivate at all. Somewhere, then, between
these two extremes, we shall come to a point where the land is just,
but only just, worth cultivating, or where, to revert to a form of
words we previously employed, it is a matter of _doubt_, whether the
land is really worth using for a productive purpose. Such land we can
regard as the "marginal land"; and since the variety of nature is at
once infinite and fairly minutely graduated we shall probably find
that on one side of this margin there is much land which is only
slightly superior, and on the other, much which is only slightly
inferior, to the marginal land itself. What, then, is likely to be the
value and the rent of this marginal land, this land which is just on
the "margin of cultivation"? Some readers may find the answer
startling. The rent of the marginal land will be nil, because it will
not pay to