An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of

127

Adam Smith

must belong to the landlord.

Good roads, canals, and navigable rivers, by diminishing the

expense of carriage, put the remote parts of the country more nearly

upon a level with those in the neighbourhood of the town. They

are upon that account the greatest of all improvements. They en-

courage the cultivation of the remote, which must always be the

most extensive circle of the country. They are advantageous to the

town by breaking down the monopoly of the country in its

neighbourhood. They are advantageous even to that part of the

country. Though they introduce some rival commodities into the

old market, they open many new markets to its produce. Mo-

nopoly, besides, is a great enemy to good management, which can

never be universally established, but in consequence of that free

and universal competition which forces every body to have re-

course to it for the sake of self defence. It is not more than fifty

years ago, that some of the counties in the neighbourhood of Lon-

don petitioned the parliament against the extension of the turn-

pike roads into the remoter counties. Those remoter counties, they

pretended, from the cheapness of labour, would be able to sell

their grass and corn cheaper in the London market than them-

selves, and would thereby reduce their rents, and ruin their culti-

vation. Their rents, however, have risen, and their cultivation has

been improved since that time.

A corn field of moderate fertility produces a much greater quan-

tity of food for man, than the best pasture of equal extent. Though

its cultivation requires much more labour, yet the surplus which

remains after replacing the seed and maintaining all that labour, is

likewise much greater. If a pound of butcher’s meat, therefore, was

never supposed to be worth more than a pound of bread, this

greater surplus would everywhere be of greater value and consti-

tute a greater fund, both for the profit of the farmer and the rent

of the landlord. It seems to have done so universally in the rude

beginnings of agriculture.

But the relative values of those two different species of food,

bread and butcher’s meat, are very different in the different peri-

ods of agriculture. In its rude beginnings, the unimproved wilds,

which then occupy the far greater part of the country, are all aban-

doned to cattle. There is more butcher’s meat than bread; and

bread, therefore, is the food for which there is the greatest compe-

tition, and which consequently brings the greatest price. At Buenos

Ayres, we are told by Ulloa, four reals, one-and-twenty pence

halfpenny sterling, was, forty or fifty years ago, the ordinary price

of an ox, chosen from a herd of two or three hundred. He says

nothing of the price of bread, probably because he found nothing

remarkable about it. An ox there, he says, costs little more than

the labour of catching him. But corn can nowhere be raised with-

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128

The Wealth of Nations

out a great deal of labour; and in a country which lies upon the

river Plate, at that time the direct road from Europe to the silver

mines of Potosi, the money-price of labour could be very cheap. It

is otherwise when cultivation is extended over the greater part of

the country. There is then more bread than butcher’s meat. The

competition changes its direction, and the price of butcher’s meat

becomes greater than the price of bread.

By the extension, besides, of cultivation, the unimproved wilds

become insufficient to supply the demand for butcher’s meat. A

great part of the cultivated lands must be employed in rearing and

fattening cattle; of which the price, therefore, must be sufficient

to pay, not only the labour necessary for tending them, but the

rent which the landlord, and the profit which the farmer, could

have drawn from such land employed in tillage. The cattle bred

upon the most uncultivated moors, when brought to the same

market, are, in proportion to their weight or goodness, sold at the

same price as those which are reared upon the most improved

land. The proprietors of those moors profit by it, and raise the

rent of their land in proportion to the price of their cattle. It is not

more than a century ago, that in many parts of the Highlands of

Scotland, butcher’s meat was as cheap or cheaper than even bread

made of oatmeal The Union opened the market of England to the

Highland cattle. Their ordinary price, at present, is about three

times greater than at the beginning of the century, and the rents of

many Highland estates have been tripled and quadrupled in the

same time. In almost every part of Great Britain, a pound of the

best butcher’s meat is, in the present times, generally worth more

than two pounds of the best white bread; and in plentiful years it

is sometimes worth three or four pounds.

It is thus that, in the progress of improvement, the rent and

profit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in some mea-

sure by the rent and profit of what is improved, and these again by

the rent and profit of corn. Corn is an annual crop; butcher’s meat,

a crop which requires four or five years to grow. As an acre of land,

therefore, will produce a much smaller quantity of the one species

of food than of the other, the inferiority of the quantity must be

compensated by the superiority of the price. If it was more than

compensated, more corn-land would be turned into pasture; and

if it was not compensated, part of what was in pasture would be

brought back into corn.

This equality, however, between the rent and profit of grass and

those of corn; of the land of which the immediate produce is food

for cattle, and of that of which the immediate produce is food for

men, must be understood to take place only through the greater

part of the improved lands of a great country. In some particular

local situations it is quite otherwise, and the rent and profit of

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