Malthus is rightly considered the first clear expounder in England of the economical doctrine of rent. Dr. James Anderson, a contemporary of Adam Smith, was no doubt before his age in his view of the subject;[497] but, perhaps because he was better known as an agriculturist than as an economist, he does not seem to have made converts. The “simultaneous rediscovery” of the true doctrine by West and Malthus in 1815 may be compared with the simultaneous discovery of the Darwinian theory by Wallace and Darwin in 1859. The times were ripe for it. Malthus gives no certain sound on the subject in the early editions of the _Essay on Population_. In the second he even says that “one of the principal ingredients in the price of British corn is the high rent of land” (p. 460; cf. p. 444). However, needing to lecture on Rent to his pupils at Haileybury in 1805, he saw the unsoundness of this position, and in 1806, in the third edition of the essay, the passage is dropped, and we are told, “universally it is price that determines rent, not rent that determines price” (vol. ii. p. 266). The passage is repeated in the fourth edition (1807).[498] But when the time came for a fifth edition, in 1817, the whole of the chapters on Corn Laws and bounties, which are the only chapters of the essay that deal much with rent, were recast, to express the clearer views which the author had already expounded elsewhere. In the spring of 1814, in the excitement of debates on the abolition of the bounty and on new laws to keep out foreign grain, Malthus was led for the fourth or fifth time in his life to take the field as a pamphleteer.[499] This time, however, he came forward, he said, not to take a side but to act as arbitrator. His “_Observations on the effects of the Corn Laws_, and of a rise or fall in the price of corn on the agriculture and general wealth of the country” (1814),[500] professed to balance the arguments for and against the Corn Laws, and did it, he said, so judiciously, that his own friends were in doubt to which opinion he leaned.[501] To later readers the bias is not doubtful. It appears even in such a passage as the following, which, incidentally, shows us his view of rent, nearly matured:—“It is a great mistake to suppose that the effects of a fall in the price of corn on cultivation may be fully compensated by a diminution of rents. Rich land, which yields a large nett rent, may be kept up in its actual state, notwithstanding a fall in the price of its produce, as a diminution of rent may be made entirely to compensate this fall, and all the additional expenses that belong to a rich and highly-taxed country. But in poor land the fund of rent will often be found quite insufficient for this purpose. There is a good deal of land in this country of such a quality, that the expenses of its cultivation, together with the outgoings of poor’s rates, tithes, and taxes, will not allow the farmer