Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Chapter III ELEMENTS OF THE LAND FACTOR PROVISION of a site on which buildings may be erected is of course antecedent to all other steps in commencing to manufacture. Whether unoccupied land is specially acquired, or a factory is already erected, the site value of the land and certain outgoings j and expenditure incident to it remain separate items, and are reducible to unit value. It will be admitted, after brief consideration, that the unit-value of sites may vary within wide limits. In large cities especially, the cost of land and the outgoing expenditure on what may be a cramped and unsatisfactory site frequently amounts to a noticeable burden on manufacture. The high assessments and heavy incidence of taxation on such city sites is giving rise (particularly in Great Britain) to a marked tendency to remove large works to country districts where land can be acquired at something near agricultural value. This tendency develops in spite of the disinclination of skilled labor to live away from the pleasures and excitements/ of large towns./ unit-value is, however, not the most important consideration in the selection of manufacturing sites. Transport facilities take first place. Much depends also on the character of the labor employed. Some classes of business, requiring the proximity of large reserves of unskilled labor to be drawn on at short notice, cannot be carried on away from crowded centres of population, j The neighborhood of raw materials is also in some cases a factor in determining the choice of sites./ But an ordinary engineering works has a wider latitude of choice than many others, and, given good transport facilities, its location depends rather on the scale and extent of the proposed undertaking than on the neighborhood of labor or materials. The scale o...