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 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