544 [Assembly 



In the first place, as I before remarked, when the tillers of the 

 soil are mere hard-worked day laborers, with no interest in the land, 

 and no hope of any, a very great and most valuable portion of the 

 community becomes degraded, and, as we should think, disfranchised, 

 deprived of that equality, that manhood, which all of us can boast; 

 and such must be the condition of the many, if the few are to hold 

 the lands; then, to insure success in this system, labor must be very 

 cheap, ill paid, and abundant, seeking rather than sought for, and 

 there must be a great demand for food, and a scant supply, or such 

 expensive improvements could not profitably be made. 



Nor, as I believe, are particular expensive improvements of certain 

 great estates of much general value or public benefit; in so far as 

 they make " two blades of grass grow where one grew before," it 

 is •weW; but then, as examples, they cannot well be followed, since 

 various estates differ in situation and locality and capacity, and 

 ■what may be done on one may not on another. It is the discovery 

 of something generally useful, something capable of application to 

 the great mass of lands, that is really desirable and valuable, and 

 these discoveries on small estates by men of moderate wealth as by 

 the great. Of what consequence is it to the public, that some morass 

 on some great estate has been filled up, or water brought to some 

 barren hill, compared with the discovery, that seaweed, or marl, or 

 electricity, are good manures for all lands. 



With us lands are divided into farms, neither very large nor very 

 small. We have no very great estates in single hands; but each one 

 cultivates his own land, which is a portion large enough for all his 

 wants, and usually well divided into different uses. The few great 

 tracts which belong, at present, tp a few- great proprietors in this 

 State, are hardly exceptions to the general rule. 



These were manorial grants before the Revolution, and some of 

 them still continue in the possession of the descendants of the origi- 

 nal owners; but how long does it require, since our former colonial 

 laws of primogeniture and entail are all abolished, to reduce these 

 possessions to the same platform with all the others? The ordinary 

 course of nature, and the quiet operation of our laws, will, without 

 any further inteiference, soon divide these great holdings into as small 

 tracts as it is desirable to parcel out agricultural estates. 



With this general, rational and natural division of lands, which 

 our laws neither unfairly hold together, like those of England, nor 



