1890.J PUBLIC DOCUMENT — Xo. 4. 173 



population ; but more have decreased because the thrifty 

 men who once lived on them have died, and their sons saw 

 more inviting fields of business enterprise in towns and cities 

 or in the West, where land could be got for nothing, and 

 which would gain in value by their industry more rapidly 

 than the old New England farm would. 



There are three essentially dilFerent ways in which agri- 

 cultural land may be owned and held ; namely, by the State, 

 by landlords constituting a landed gentry, or by the farmers 

 themselves. There is now much clamor that the land be 

 owned by the State, and rented to those who till it, by the 

 politicians who may control the public offices. But I know 

 of no civilized nation to-day in which the land is so owned, 

 nor does any case occur to me wdiere a nation or people has 

 risen to a high state of civilization without private owner- 

 ship in land. If the State is to own the land, the State must 

 have the right to rent it to whom it pleases ; to say to this 

 man. Live here, and to that man. Live there ; it must have 

 the right also, when it thinks the population becomes too 

 dense, to export men when it pleases and where it pleases, 

 otherwise there Avill be over-population in some places. 

 The State ownership of land belongs to barbarism and not 

 to civilization. It is the common kind of land tenure among 

 savages the world over, and it is extraordinary that it should 

 be revived so late in the nineteenth century ; and there is 

 need of a class of intelligent farmers owning the land they 

 till, to meet and fight this growing political heresy. There 

 must be private property in land, or there can be no progress 

 in agriculture, and no liberty for those who till tlie soil. 



Private ownership may be divided into two systems : first, 

 where the land is held in large bodies by a privileged class, 

 and rented for tillage by a class having restricted political 

 privileges and holding an inferior social position ; second, 

 where it is owned by those who till it, and where it con- 

 fers no special political privileges not conferred by other 

 kinds of property. 



Most of the land in the old world was held according to 

 the first of these tenures until very lately, and much of it is 

 still so held. On the continent the cultivators were and are 

 still largely what is called a peasant class, — a class of in- 



