cultivate it, if any appreciable rent is charged. A piece
of land for which it is worth a tenant's while to pay an appreciable
rent, will not be the marginal land, because there will be land just
slightly inferior to it which it will also pay to cultivate if a
somewhat lower rent is charged. And so we can pass to poorer and
poorer qualities of land, with an ever diminishing rent, until at the
margin of cultivation the derived utility of the land is negligible
and the rent vanishes.

This certainly is a somewhat abstract conception; but it is by no
means so remote from reality as may at first sight appear. The reader
may protest that in the course of an extensive and varied acquaintance
with landowners, he has not yet run across this peculiar marginal
type, who lets his land for no rent at all. But there, if his
experience is really extensive, I think he is mistaken. It so happens
that the ordinary agricultural landowner leases out his land, not by
itself, but together with a variety of other things such as farm
buildings, which it costs him a considerable sum of money to
provide. He will not as a rule be willing to go to this expense,
unless he sees his way to obtain for the farm an annual payment, which
represents at least a fair return on this capital outlay, as big a
return as he could have got, for instance, by investing the same
amount of money in some gilt-edged security. This annual payment
will, it is true, be called rent; but the significance of this is that
what we term rent in ordinary life is usually a complex thing, made up
of two essentially distinct elements, viz. the normal return on the
capital goods supplied together with the land, and what we may call
the "net rent," or the "pure rent" attributable to the land
itself. Now will any reader make so bold as to say that there is no
land under cultivation, in respect of which this net rent is either
nil or negligible? The landowners will not agree with him. It is not
a question, it should be observed, as to whether the rent obtained
represents more than a fair return on the purchase price paid for the
land; that is quite another matter. The question is whether the rent
obtained exceeds a fair return on the capital sum spent on the
buildings, etc.; with which every farm must be equipped to let at
all. In fact there are not a few farms where there is no such excess,
and where accordingly there is no "net rent" or "pure rent" which can
be attributed to the la