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

 race ; whether the blood which flows in our veins is 

 drawn from the tenant-farmer of England or tlie 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 Avhich 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 

 oppression of the landlord. If, as may be, we reckoni 

 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 

 starvation, that without land man was nothing ; that to 

 be landless was to be helpless. 



Thus we come 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 most carefully guarded 

 records. Whoever looks over the farms of New England, 

 even, will see that quantity of land in the hands of the 

 individual was all that was sought for, while in the far 

 West, where land was practically illimitable and to be ■ 

 had almost without price, w^e hear of farmers counting 

 their acres by thousands upon thousands. And in New 

 York, in the earlier days, the manors of, the patroons . 



