270 TRANSACTIONS OF THE 



on two sides by two roads, requiring 1,375 feet of fencing, and on the 

 other two sides by two cattle-pasturing neighbors, requiring for my half 

 of the fence which the laws of the State of New York require me to build 

 and keep in good order, 530 feet more of fencing. Now to make a sub- 

 stantial stone wall, which is about the only substantial fence that West- 

 chester county farmers do build, such as one would be willing to have near 

 his house, is worth twenty-five cents a foot, and would make the first cost 

 of an outside fence $475, and the annual tax for interest and cost of repair, 

 and in time rebuilding, say ten per cent, which is $47.50 a year. What 

 do I get for this annual and eternal tax upon my industry — a tax of nearly $6 

 an acre, or two per cent of its saleable value ? Not one single iota. And how- 

 ever much I might be in need of pasturage, I would no more think of turning 

 my cattle out to run at large within that inclosure than I would turn ray- 

 self out, Nebuchadnezzar-like, to take the range of the fields. And I 

 would just as soon turn myself out as a common highwayman, as I would 

 turn any kind of stock into the road to prowl upon my neighbors, and pick 

 up a dishonest living. And as for the honesty of the case, I think the 

 highwayman has the best of it. He may have the excuse of necessity for 

 saying "Your money or your life;" and I may yield which I think the 

 least of. Not so with the man who turns his cattle out upon the highway. 

 He sneaks behind the law, and says " Keep your fences up and your gates 

 shut, or I will rob you, without any necessity therefor or profit to myself, 

 of what has cost you years of toil to produce." Here, upon one side of 

 my farm, is a poor tenant farmer, with one yoke of oxen, a cow, and some 

 pigs, and scant pasturage, and he might have some excuse for pasturing 

 the road ; but he does not. The force of early education is against it. 

 He is an Englishman. He does not come from a country guilty of such 

 heathenish barbarism. On the other side, I have a neighbor who owns his 

 land, and is abundantly able to pasture his pigs and cows ; and so he does, 

 and has for yeai-s — in the public road. I can't leave open a gate long 

 enough to drive out, without being in danger of having my garden rooted 

 up by Staats Valentine's old sow, or having some of my new fruit or orna- 

 mental trees destroyed by his omnipresent old cows. He claims it as a 

 part of his inalienable right to pasture the highway. So it is, along his 

 own fence, which is a very short one ; but neither he nor any other man 

 has any honest right to go one foot beyond. Turning cattle out to run at 

 large within ten miles of the Central Park is an outrage upon common 

 sense, a breach of good morals — an imposition upon neighbors — a contempt 

 of Christ's maxim of " do unto others," &c., which can only be accounted 

 for by a very false code of morals, grown up with some of the old settlers 

 of this country, that law should, if argument wont, reform. And the 

 division fence that I have been compelled to build, where there was none, 

 and no need of one, except to keep my neighbors' cattle out of my corn 

 field, they should have been compelled, not me, to put there, if they want 

 it — I do not. I have no use for it, and never shall have. I had no use 

 for an interior fence, which I found, cutting my eight acres into halves, and 



