380 EUROPEAN AGRICULTURE. 



seem that the earth belongs to those who possess it ; and that, 

 when a man once quits it forever, his rights in it should cease : 

 yet society admits the remarkable fact, that men who died cen 

 turies ago shall determine how the. land at present shall be used 

 and appropriated ; or that it shall not be used nor appropriated 

 at all. 



It does not come within my province to enter upon matters 

 of dispute, which, in a period full of questions and inquiries, seem 

 to be assuming importance, and are becoming matters of private 

 and public discussion. I am well aware of the necessity of 

 giving as perfect a security as human society admits of to the 

 rights of property ; but these rights, it would seem, should be 

 held in subserviency to a still higher right, and that is, the right 

 to live. That which a man produces by his industry or toil, by 

 his skill or genius, exerted without prejudice to the equal rights 

 of another man, is his own; it is his exclusively, and it should 

 be his in perpetuity ; that is, the appropriation of it should be 

 his, and should be uncontrolled excepting so far as to prevent its 

 application to an immoral object, to an object prejudicial to 

 health or life, or to the public peace and welfare. But the appro 

 priation of the soil itself to any object in perpetuity, the shutting 

 it up from use, the prevention of its occupation for purposes of 

 human comfort and subsistence, seem incompatible with those 

 natural rights with which the Creator endowed man when he 

 commanded him to till the earth, that he might from it obtain a 

 subsistence. The laws in many of the states of the United 

 States, when the property of a debtor is seized for the payment 

 of his debts, very properly take care to leave him in the posses 

 sion of the tools of his trade, that he may still provide for his 

 own, and the subsistence of those dependent on him. A law 

 which would rob him of his tools, and, while the community 

 and his duty to himself and his family require that he should by 

 his labor provide for himself and them, should virtually put it 

 out of his power to exert that industry, would be of the same 

 character with that which, under any pretence or form, in the 

 midst of hungry and starving thousands, excludes them from the 

 use of that soil from which Heaven designed they should get 

 their bread, and from which only it can be obtained. It is one 

 of the great effects of the revolution which gave independence 

 to the United States, and of the great French revolution, that 



