MR. Oliver's address. 21 



Now when wg speak of the acquisition and possession of land, 

 the thought at once springs within us, that there never has 

 been, and is not now, a people under the face of heaven, so tho- 

 roughly appetent thereof, as the Anglo-Saxon race, — " a part of 

 which we are." They have been stealers of it, or annexers of 

 it, from the earliest times in which History knows them, to 

 the present day, both in their aggregated condition as states 

 or nations, and in their individual capacity as squatters, " a 

 name odious to the ears of all great landholders, and which is 

 given to those enterprizing worthies, who seize upon land first, 

 and take their chance to make good their title to it after- 

 wards."* Wherever foothold or finger-hold can be had, for 

 cause or without cause, there have they grasped and clung 

 with a tenacity that never gives release. The misfortune has 

 been, that, in much of the old world, whence they sprung 

 and wherein they mostly are, the existence of privileged class, 

 or the laws of primogeniture, have been and are now, steadily 

 in operation, to monopolize it by thousands of acres in the 

 hands of a few, and thousands of acres of it now, are shut in 

 from public view, by miles and miles of brick walls, so that 

 in England there is but one man in every four hundred and 

 seventy, who has a right to put his feet on any soil but that 

 of the common highway. 



But our fathers began in a different, and in the right way, 

 and the operation of our equitable laws, in the subdivision of 

 the property of the parent, landed and other property, equally 

 among all his children, cannot fail to keep a righteous balance 

 in this direction. The attempt was once made, when our 

 great North-Western territories were secured to us, to divide 

 them into monster estates, to be owned, if so, by a (e\v, and 

 those few, of course, the richer portion of the community, for 

 they alone could buy in large parcels. Against this proposed 

 system of monopoly, the late lamented General Harrison, who 

 by a single treaty acquired for the United States, more than 

 fifty millions of acres, successfully exerted his influence, and 

 we have now a system of division and subdivision of land, in 

 the great West, by which the poorest settler may become a 



* Washington Irvincr. 



