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mill or the shoe-factory, — who owns no land and hires the 

 house he lives in, and has made no study of the abstract 

 question of adjusting taxes, the proposition to levy a single 

 tax, and that on land, has an attraction hard to be over- 

 come. It looks simple — a great consideration in adjusting- 

 taxes — it looks easy to assess and difficult to evade 

 If you urge the terrible disturbance of prices and land" 

 tenures which must result, he looks complacently to the 

 future, that special providence of schemers, to readjust 

 such matters. I do not argue the probability or the im- 

 probability of such an issue. I merely call attention to it 

 as a possibility, and to the hopeless preponderance of the 

 cities over the towns, — of the non-holders over the holders 

 of land, in population, in wealth, in political control, in 

 everything except intelligence and character which goes 

 to make up the collective potency of a people. And I 

 venture the prediction that if a single tax on land is ever 

 substituted for the present system, the Essex County 

 farmer, as we have known him, — as he was known to 

 Timothy Pickering in the opening quarter of this century 

 — the master of a little farm, well tilled — the holder of his 

 hundred acres upon which he first saw the sunlight smiling, 

 and upon which it is his hope to live, and toil, and work 

 out a caieer, and find his comfort and his refuge from 

 corroding cares, and rear a family and die respected, Avill 

 find himself ground to powder between the upper and the 

 nether millstones of coinpetition and taxation, and will 

 disappear, in the long process of financial readjustment, 

 like flies in winter, out of sight forever. 



May that day be distant ! May some better fate await 

 the farmer of Essex County ! May we not live to see dear 

 old Massachusetts with all her little farms — the very bed- 

 rock of our splendid citizenship and personal independence 

 and intelligence and martial strength, — may we not live to 

 see this grand old commonwealth given over to any 



