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hesitate to say, The small farms of New England. It is the 

 subdivision of the soil and the facility of acquiring land 

 which has made each man in his nature and bearing a sov- 

 ereign. The observation of the most careless cannot fail to 

 have shown him, that the first acre, which a young man ac- 

 quires by the fruits of his own labor, stamps that man with 

 a dignity and an importance, which are seen and felt through 

 life ; and we shall find not only better citizens but a better 

 government in proportion as we find young men, on attaining 

 their majorities, becoming possessed, in their own absolute 

 right, of some portion, however small, of the soil. The laws, 

 therefore, which favor the subdivision of lands — that bring 

 the ownership of lands not only within the means but with- 

 in the easy and certain grasp of every aspirant for it, are those 

 which are best adapted to secure and perpetuate political sov- 

 ereignty in the body of the people. 



Establish to-day throughout the British empire the laws 

 of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which regulate the 

 descent and distribution of the estates of deceased persons, 

 and those which relate to the alienation of real estate and 

 the barring of entails, and the child lives, who shall see that 

 proud government totter and fall. Those baronial and im- 

 perial estates, the accumulations of centuries, the pride and 

 the grandeur of the few, the degradation of the many, would 

 crumble and waste. It would not need a dissoluteness of the 

 heir to open the grounds to the competition of the tenant 

 and the peasant ; and soou — very soon — those old castles 

 would be vacated by their titled occupants and a truer and 

 higher nobility by nature would succeed them. It would be 

 said, literally, as was figuratively said of their system of reme- 

 dial law^ that their old Gothic Castles, erected in the days 

 of chivalry, were fitted up for a modern inhabitant; that 

 their moated ramparts and embattled towers and their tro- 

 phied halls, though magnificent and venerable, were useless 

 and neglected, but that the inferior apartments, accommo- 

 dated to a new and daily use, had become cheerful and 



