The immediate cause of rent is obviously the excess of price
above the cost of production at which raw produce sells in the
market.

The first object therefore which presents itself for inquiry,
is the cause or causes of the high price of raw produce.

After very careful and repeated revisions of the subject, I
do not find myself able to agree entirely in the view taken of
it, either by Adam Smith, or the Economists; and still less, by
some more modern writers.

Almost all these writers appear to me to consider rent as too
nearly resembling in its nature, and the laws by which it is
governed, the excess of price above the cost of production, which
is the characteristic of a monopoly.

Adam Smith, though in some parts of the eleventh chapter of
his first book he contemplates rent quite in its true light,(1)
and has interspersed through his work more just observations on
the subject than any other writer, has not explained the most
essential cause of the high price of raw produce with sufficient
distinctness, though he often touches on it; and by applying
occasionally the term monopoly to the rent of land, without
stopping to mark its more radical peculiarities, he leaves the
reader without a definite impression of the real difference
between the cause of the high price of the necessaries of life,
and of monopolized commodities.

Some of the views which the Economists have taken of the