Item 25 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

Brasted - WW can send or show this letter to Thomas Malthus: 'I was gratified of course by his letter [Malthus] but merciful powers or what sort of a dreamy land of speculation does he urge me to enter. Rents in America!...If one must guess what they are to come to there, why then I guess that with their democratic institutions and territorial resources they will keep multiplying a race of peasant proprietors till their territory and probable conquests (to Sierra del Fuego perhaps) are full'. Then the land of these peasant proprietors will gradually sink till they become poor, and from their discontentment will come political convulsion which may produce another state. Out of which 'tenantry rents may spring but these periods look to me more like geological than political ones'. However much RJ admires and esteems Malthus 'he shall involve me into no balloon excursions. I think too he underrates peasant rents - what I value most in my book is the revelation (for it is one) of the intimate connection between the subsistence of the body of the people, and the rents they pay, over almost the whole of the old world - By this fact and its reaction on government, and society, the past history, the present condition, the future progress, of a vast majority of human communities have been, are, and will be in ages, influenced. I half flatter myself, that no sound thinker will hereafter speculate on such subjects, without having the principles and results I have brought to light, distinctly present to him, and therefore, as a citizen of the world...I cannot admit that the farmers rents, because they happen to be over and yet less, the urban rents of America and Australia, can compete with my peasant rents in interest and importance'.