Pagina 408 van 2651

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

profit of unimproved pasture come to be regulated in some measure

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.