Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen and PG Distributed
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If we can believe an eminent authority, in which we are disposed toplace great trust, the oldest contest that has divided society is thatwhich has so long been waged between the House of HAVE and the House ofWANT. It began before the bramble was chosen king of the trees, and ithas outlasted the cedars of Lebanon. We find it going on when Herodotuswrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth century willhave to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it. Thereseems never to have been a time when it was not old, or a race thatwas not engaged in it, from the Tartars, who cook their meat bymaking saddle-cloths of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpledrose-leaves. Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patriciansand Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine ciompi, Normannobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanishhidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New Englandfarmers,—these and a hundred other races or orders have all beenparties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its objectthe acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against theever-threatening fiend which we call WANT. Property once obtained, thepossessor's next aim is to keep it. The very fact, that the mode ofacquisition may have been wrong, and subversive of property-rights, ifsuffered to be imitated, naturally makes its possessor suspicious andcruel. He fears that the measure he has meted to others may be meted tohim again. Hence severe laws, the monopoly of political power and ofpolitical offices by property-holders, the domination of conqueringraces, and the practice of attributing to all reformers designs againstproperty and its owners, though the changes they recommend may really beof a nature calculated to make the tenure of property more secure thanever. Even the charge of irreligion has not been found more effectiveagainst the advocates of improvement or change than that ofAgrarianism,—by which is meant hostility to existing propertyinstitutions, and a determination, if possible, to subvert them. Of thetwo, the charge of Agrarianism is the more serious, as it implies theother. A man may be irreligious, and yet a great stickler for property,because a great owner of it,—or because he is by nature stanchlyconservative, and his infidelity merely a matter of logic. But if therebe any reason for charging a man with Agrarianism, though it be never sounreasonable a reason, his infidelity is taken for granted, and it wouldbe labor lost to attempt to show the contrary. Nor is this conclusion soaltogether irrational as it appears at the first sight. Religion isan ordinance of God, and so is property; and if a man be suspected ofhostility to the latter, why should he not be held positively guiltytowards the former? Every man is religious, though but few men governtheir lives according to religious precepts; but every man not onlyloves property and desires to possess it, but allows considerationsgrowing out of its rights to have a weight on his mind far more grave,far more productive of positive results, than religion has on the commonperson. If there be such a thing as an Agrarian on earth, he would fightbravely for his land, though it should be of no greater extent thanwould suffice him for a grave, according to the strictest measurementof the potter's field. Would every honest believer do as much for hisreligion?
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