AGRICULTURE OF MASSACHUSETTS, 



AMERICAN MANIA FOE LARGE FARMS. 



From au Address before the Essex Agricultural Society. 



BY BENJAMIN P. BUTLER. 



Our fathers came from a land-loving, land-hoarding race, 

 whether the blood wliich flows in our veins is drawn from the 

 tenant-farmer of England or the lord of the soil. From the first, 

 our ancestors knew, by bitter experience, the want of land, the 

 grinding oppression of rent-paying — had felt the power which 

 possession of it gives — the place which the lord of the soil held 

 amongst princes and kings ; aye, and had felt what was the fate 

 of the landless, and how little he could withstand the oppres- 

 sion of the landlord. If, as may be, we reckon back our blood 

 from some noble house of England, it came through the veins 

 of the cadet, the younger son of that house, whom the law of 

 primogeniture had made as landless as the tenant. He had 

 seen all of it swept away by the elder brother, while he was left 

 to seek his fortune and his livelihood in the wilds of a new 

 world. Or, if our ancestry was of the down-trodden sons of 

 Ireland, they had learned, through tyranny, wrong and starva- 

 tion, that without land man was nothing ; that to be landless 

 was to be helpless. 



Thus we came naturally, and by inheritance, to be imbued 



almost with a mania for soil-getting ; and our fathers strove to 



possess themselves of as much land as possible to encompass 



with their fences, and to assure its title in themselves by the 



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