The Private Ownership of Land [pp. 125-147]

THER PRZNCE TO RE VIE VW.
On the other hand, laborers will feel the stimulus to industry and frugality. The unmarried will cease to accept the lot
of their fathers who have gone before them, and aspire to a
higher destiny, and defer marriage till they can own their own
cottage and the plot of ground on which it stands. A new element of hope will be infused into the life of the whole agricultural population. It seems to us that nothing can be more
obvious than that the statesmen of Europe and the world must
come to this as the only foundation on which it is possible to
rear a social structure which can stand the shocks of political
agitation and defy the corrosion of time. We as Americans
have no other reason for more profound gratitude to God for
his goodness to our country than for the fact that American
society is built on this impregnable foundation.
It is high time that all agrarians and social levellers should
at length learn (what they have by no means begun to learn as
yet) that what they really want for the remedy of the evils
against which they are accustomed so eloquently to inveigh is,
not the abolition of the private ownership of land, but its universal establishment as the fundamental law of all civilized society.
The crushing weight under which civilization is groaning is not
the private ownership of land, but the absolute want of it in,
most other countries except our own. The English monopoly
of land is for the want of full and complete ownership in the
present holder. If the present holder could sell his land at his
option, and if his creditor could seize and sell it for the payment
of debt, the English land monopoly would be at an end, and
English society would be placed on a new line of progress for
all the future. It is quite true that if the laborer is hindered by
the laws, and by immemorial custom co-operating with the laws,
from becoming the owner of land, he will inevitably sink to a
condition but little removed from that of slavery; but if the
ownership of land is subjected to all the conditions and liabilities which are involved in the possession of any other kind of
property, the private ownership of land has no more tendency
to enslave or degrade the laborer than the exclusive proprietorship of any other species of property. What has just been said
of England may be said, mutatis mutandis, of most other countries of the world. They are agitated by an ardent passion for
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