THE PROBLEM OF RENT 111

capital goods, the actual return may be of the nature of rent,
a quasi-rent, to use Professor Marshall's term, but, in a broad
view of the organisation of production, the question of
whether such return, when considered as a proportion of the
cost of the capital goods, rises above or falls below the
interest rate, will affect the supply of those goods, and hence
the abundance, and the value, of the commodities they serve
to produce. The maintenance of the return at a sufficient
proportion of the cost of the capital goods is, then, a condition
of the maintenance of the supply of commodities, and thus
truly a determining element in their supply. Such a condition
 does not hold for land rents, for the available supply
of land is not responsive to changes in the rent-paying power
of land. Land, so far as the properties of situation and
extension are concerned, and not including in that term
capital bound up in improvements of the soil and capable of
exhaustion, is available for use in the same degree whether
it is able to secure for its owners a high or a low return,
The payment of any particular rent for land, is not, therefore, a
condition of the maintenance of the supply of the commodities
raised from it, and thus rent does not enter into the price of
agricultural produce. It is not possible to apply the same
conceptions to prove that it is equally true that interest does
not enter into price, or that wages do not enter into price.
Let us examine the application of this doctrine to urban
land. We find proprietors of shops occasionally advertising
that they can sell cheaply because they are not burdened
with heavy rents. But it is hardly to be supposed that
dealers would willingly pay heavy rents, for sites in principal
thoroughfares, if they could save by setting up their businesses
on less heavily rented land, in distant suburbs or in less
frequented streets. The opportunities, offered by the site in
a main thoroughfare, for doing a large business, and thus
securing a large profit, enable a high rent to be paid for that
site without abandoning all the advantages presented by its
occupation, as against a similar area fronting on a back
street. Experience shows that, generally speaking, the large
shop on a leading street attracts custom by prices as low as
those of less pretentious establishments in minor thorough-