18 MASSACHUSETTS AGRICULTURE. 



owns ninety-six thousand acres in a single county in England, 

 and the income of the ^laivjuis of Westminster is a million or 

 more of dollars a year. 



The influence of this tremendous inequality in rank and con- 

 dition, as connected with the ownership of the lands of the king- 

 dom, cannot fail to impress itself upon the whole social condition 

 of England, — class and rank pervade every thing. And there is 

 nothing which strikes a stranger more sensibly, while studying 

 the habits of the English people, than the subserviency to supe- 

 riority in blood or rank, which runs through the whole nation, 

 from the first Duke of the realm down to the humblest cabman in 

 the street. The lordly land owner, whether titled or not, looks 

 down with condescension upon the farmer who hires his land. 

 And he, in turn, looks down upon the hedger or ditcher or plough- 

 man who does the work upon it, and rare, indeed, is the instance 

 of one, brought up under such institutions, attempting to call 

 their wisdom or their humanity into question. Indeed, the law 

 has, for hundreds of years, lent its strong aid in perpetuating 

 these ideas by the rights of primogeniture which it secures, and 

 the practical system of entailment which it favors. 



These notions , we are to remember, took root and grew up 

 before these modern days of the loom and the spinning jenny. 

 Whether they could have ever obtained against an antagonism 

 like that of a community of artisans and manufacturers, I have 

 no occasion now to discuss. John Bull was born and had 

 grown up to manhood, with all his domineering ways and habits 

 of assurance, long before Arkwright was heard of, or Crompton 

 had conceived of his mule, or Watt of the steam-engine. We 

 arc to look for the origin of his uncomfortable manners and 

 habits away back in his history, when the baron lived at home 

 in the country surrounded by his vassals, and never thought it 

 necessary to spend three-quarters of the year in the din and 

 smoke of Loudon, to help give a tone to the omnipotence of 

 public 0j)iuioii. 



The tendency of throwing into the hands of any one j)roprie- 

 tor large quantities of land, over which he is master, but upon 

 which lie is not obliged to labor, in exciting and strengthening 

 a proud and hauglity spirit incompatible with any thing like 

 practical equality in the classes or employments into which com- 

 munities are divided, may be traced in the history and condition 



