The real opinion of Malthus came out in the second Corn Law pamphlet on the _Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of restricting the Importation of Foreign Corn_ (1815). Between the two came the tract on Rent, which is rather an economical book than a political pamphlet, and will be noticed immediately. He now declares himself in favour of a temporary duty on imported corn to countervail the artificially low value of the currency,—“to get rid of that part of our prices which belongs to great wealth, combined with a system of restrictions.”[513] He warns the Government that they should not take such a step to benefit a particular trade, but only to benefit the public. The motives are those constantly professed by defenders of the Navigation Act—not private interests but public policy. Since he wrote his _Observations_ circumstances had changed. The sudden peace had brought the then unprecedented combination of a bad harvest and low prices; the value of the currency had fallen fast; and last, and not least, France, the best corn country in Europe, had begun to prohibit the exportation of grain[514] in dear years. We must therefore, he says, keep up the high farming which the war taught us, by keeping up the high prices of the war. Eighty shillings might not be too high a price, for the limit of prohibited importation. It seems extraordinary that, after so clearly recognizing that “wealth does not consist in the dearness or cheapness of the usual measures of value, but in the quantity of produce,” and that exports are not so good a criterion of wealth as the “quantity of produce consumed at home,”[515] Malthus should recommend the increase of abundance by means of artificial dearness. It is a poor consolation to us that he was no worse than Brougham, who voted for the Corn Law in 1815, and for the support of the Navigation Act in 1849,—and little worse than Ricardo, who would allow a temporary restriction for the sake of leaseholders.[516] A better is that he was advocating a policy that was against his private interests as a holder of a fixed salary and owner of three per cents.[517] But at the best the atmosphere of these two tracts is a little depressing. The tract on Rent is more bracing. It was the first-fruits of the larger work on _Political Economy_ (1820); and its substance had been delivered in the professor’s lectures at Haileybury. It expounds the _Nature and Progress of Rent_ with clearness and intelligibility, if without the liveliness of 1798. Malthus gives us to understand that, to explain this or any other economical notion, we must keep as closely as possible to the usage of ordinary language, the language of clear-thinking ordinary men.[518]