AND WHERE TO FIND ONE. 29 



rebellion, approved July 17th, 1862; all lands which may 

 be sold under the provisions of the act for the collection of 

 direct taxes in insurrectionary districts, approved June 7th, 

 1862; and all lands which may be sold under the provi 

 sions of the act to provide internal revenue to support the 

 Government, approved July 1st of the same year. 



&quot; What shall be done with these immense estates, brought 

 within our power by the acts of rebels ? One or two poli 

 cies, radically antagonistic, must be accepted. They must 

 be allowed to fall into the hands of speculators, and become 

 the basis of new and frightful monopolies, or they must be 

 placed under the jurisdiction of the Government, in trust 

 for the people. The alternative is now presented, and 

 presses upon us for a speedy decision. Under the laws of 

 Congress now in force, unchecked by counter legislation, 

 these lands will be purchased and monopolized by men who 

 care far more for their own mercenary gains than for the 

 real progress and glory of our country. Instead of being 

 parcelled out into small homesteads, to be tilled by their 

 own independent owners, they will be bought in large 

 tracts, and thus not only deprive the great mass of landless 

 laborers of the opportunity of acquiring homes, but place 

 them at the mercy of the lords of the soil. The old order 

 of things will be swept away, but a new order, scarcely less 

 to be deplored, will succeed. In place of the slaveholding 

 landowner of the South, lording it over hundreds of slaves 

 and thousands of acres, we shall have the grasping monop 

 olist of the North, whose dominion over the freedman and 

 poor whites will be more galling than slavery itself, which 

 in some degree tempers its despotism through the interest 

 of the tyrant in the health and welfare of his victims. The 

 maxim of the slaveholder that capital should own labor, will 

 be as frightfully exemplified under the system of wages 



