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INSTABILITY OF AM-KKICAN LIFE. 
ever sown so liberally, and, in their own persons, reaped so 
scanty a return, as the pioneers of Anglo-American social life. 
We can repay our debt to our noble forefathers only by a like 
magnanimity, by a like self-forgetting care for the moral and 
material interests of our own posterity. 
Instability of American Life. 
All human institutions, associate arrangements, modes of 
life, have their characteristic imperfections. The natural, per¬ 
haps the necessary defect of ours, is their instability, their 
want of fixedness, not in form only, but even in spirit. The 
face of physical nature in the United States shares this inces¬ 
sant fluctuation, and the landscape is as variable as the habits 
of the population. It is time for some abatement in the rest¬ 
less love of change which characterizes us, and makes us al¬ 
most a nomade rather than a sedentary people.* We have now 
felled forest enough everywhere, in many districts far too much. 
Let us restore this one element of material life to its normal 
* It is rare that a middle-aged American dies in the house where he 
was horn, or an old man even in that which he has built; and this is 
scarcely less true of the rural districts, where every man owns his habit¬ 
ation, than of the city, where the majority live in hired houses. This life 
of incessant flitting is unfavorable for the execution of permanent improve¬ 
ments of every sort, and especially of those which, like the forest, are 
slow in repaying any part of the capital expended in them. It requires a 
very generous spirit in a landholder to plant a wood on a farm he expects 
to sell, or which he knows will pass out of the hands of his descendants 
at his death. But the very fact of having begun a plantation would attach 
the proprietor more strongly to the soil for which he had made such a 
sacrifice; and the paternal acres would have a greater value in the eyes of 
a succeeding generation, if thus improved and beautified by the labors of 
those from whom they were inherited. Landed property, therefore, the 
transfer of which is happily free from every legal impediment or restric¬ 
tion in the United States, would find, in the feelings thus prompted, a 
moral check against a too frequent change of owners, and would tend to 
remain long enough in one proprietor or one family to admit of gradual 
improvements which would increase its value both to the possessor and to 
the state. 
