8 Letters from the United States of North America. [Jak. 



of the natives, the free white North American people. Nor, if you con- 

 sider the price of land here, the facilities of trade, the liigh rate of 

 wages, and the powerful temptiitions to marriage, will you wonder at all 

 this. Wliy should one class of people continue to serve another class, in 

 a state where, with a little foresight, and a twelvemonth's wages, they 

 may keep their chins above water without serving any body. I do not 

 mean without work, for they must work hard for a while, and fare hard 

 for two or three years, after they have become " proprietors," or set up 

 for themselves in trade; but I mean without working altogether, or 

 chiefly for the advantage of others. 



A few material changes have occurred of late years, in the larger 

 commercial towns, jvhich have started up along the sea board of this 

 prodigious empire ; but in general, throughout all the country, the 

 employer, as they call the party paying, and the help,* or assistant, or 

 clerk, or man, or maid, as they call the party receiving pay, eat of the 

 very same food, out of the very same dish, at the very same table, and at 

 the very same hour. They sleep alike, they dress alike, and, in the very 

 presence of each other, laugh and talk alike. Authority and subjection, 

 power and obedience, are idle names ; the employer and the employed 

 are more like partners in the same trade or business, or members of the 

 same family, than like ajiy thing else. But for the ditference of age, 

 the employer being of course, in such a country, almost always the 

 elder of the two, no stranger, on seeing the servant with his master, 

 would be able to say " which was which." 



Every farmer's boy, if unable to purchase an acre of land for himself 

 when he is free, begins the world by working out for somebody else, for 

 what are called " half wages, with leave to school," — that is with leave 

 to go to school at one of the multitude of petty schools which are paid 

 for out of tlie public treasury, and are scattered all over the New Eng- 

 land States, and a part of the middle states, in such plenty, that for 

 about five or six months of the year in the country, and for the whole 

 year in the villages or towns, every child, whether black or white, ricli 

 or poor, may have schooling without pay ; or he begins the world by 

 working with some neighbouring established farmer at full wages, until 

 he has been able to save a few dollars, twenty or thirty, perhaps, not 

 more ; when he " pulls up stakes," pushes off into the " woods," or the 

 " Western Countrj'" — that coimtry which is forever to the west of a 

 yankee's habitation, be that habitation where it may — the other side of 

 where the sun sets, if you will, and after a while, becomes a " squat- 

 ter (a sort of unlawful intruderf upon territory unappropriated, so far 

 as appears belonging to " no body as no body knows of") and, after 

 another interval, a wretched farmer, and then, after another interval, a 

 great landed proprietor. 



It is the ambition of this people to become freeholders — of any thing, 

 so it be a freehold in the language of law — of woods and waters, rocks 

 or mountains. They have caught the foolish desire from the poor 

 shipwrecked men of Europe, who, in the great convulsions of the age, 

 have been cast ashore in America; and who, after growing up, where the 



* This word help is made use of only in a part of three or four states which run 

 together in two or three places ; and is there made use of only to describe a female 

 domestic, who is enipl«yed as much for weaving as foi- household atfairs. 



f I say «>(/«;('/'»/ intruder, to distinguish the squatters of America from the lawful 

 intruders, who give one so much trouhh' in Europe. 



