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man ought to be grateful, that I turn with individual pride and 

 satisfaction to the record which American agriculture has 

 made for itself during the last year. This unusual and 

 extraordinary prosperity is due undoubtedly to many causes, 

 both natural and artificial ; the natural causes being our 

 diversity of soil and climate, the variety of our crops, and the 

 economy with which new and fertile lands can be cultivated; 

 the artificial causes being the advantages of local and general 

 markets, and the relations established between the farmer and 

 the soil he cultivates by the independent ownership of land 

 under the laws of our country. To this last cause I attribute 

 much of that elasticity and energy which the American far- 

 mers manifest in occupying new lands, and in the cultivation 

 of crops adapted to the markets they can reach. It was not 

 easy to tell the strength and stimulus which come through the 

 ownership of the soil to him who occupies it, has fixed his 

 home upon it, and looks to it for his means of subsistence. It 

 is to the division and subdivision of the land, almost as much 

 as to their devotion to the institutions of learning and relig- 

 ion, and their determination to secure all social and civil 

 rights, that our fathers owe their success in establishing free 

 government on this continent. They had the Anglo-Saxon 

 love of land, but aV)ove all this they had the Anglo-Saxon love 

 of individual independence ; and landed monopolies, entail 

 and primogeniture were especially odious to them. They 

 established, in the earliest colonial days, a system of landhold- 

 ing so simple, so exact, so easily managed that it has become 

 the example which all republican governments follow. They 

 established a public registry of deeds, and provided for an 

 easy and recorded transfer of landed estates from hand to 

 hand, as easy as the transfer of personal property. The state 



