it and that meantime no person shall be allowed upon any pretext to acquire more than the prescribed by law what says an would take away a part of a man s land honestly acquired by inheritance gift or purchase and give it to some one else who needs it no sir there is no call for this let every man keep through life what the law has once decided to be his but when the landlord of thousands of acres shall die it is perfectly just it is expedient that the which has assured and guarded his ample possessions shall say with regard to land as it has long said with regard to thus far and no farther let the dying rich man leave all his to his but let him not the land which reason with experience in to the dearest interests of mankind the law may say and should say take the property messrs and share it as you shall agree or as the ministers of justice shall decide only it is that none of you shall take and retain beyond a certain limit say acres of soil whatever falls to any one in excess of that must be sold within a year to some person who will still have less than the legal after a few years this will have been entirely adjusted and no man having more than the quantity none will be in of what he has only the man who has already as much as the law allows him will be required on coming into possession of more to choose what portions of the whole not exceeding the legal he will retain selling the to some one who has no land or less than the legal allowance within the term by law when population shall have grown considerably more dense a limit op labor may justly be to which possessions shall be required gradually to as we have already seen i might well despair of on any mind which has not hitherto reflected on this subject the vital importance and vast of the principle of land to me it seems die very key of the arch which is destined to the millions from their degradation and misery i trace the frequent lack of employment the reward and the often accorded to labor directly to the influence of land here for example is a new i community just emerging from or just planted on a virgin soil for a season all goes well with it no man stands idle for want of employment and industry what it has sown but population gradually the land is all appropriated and good soil gradually rises in market value from ten to one hundred dollars per acre and perhaps higher is it not inevitable that it is now far more difficult than formerly for the young man to buy a farm and become his own employer and that he who as the tenant or of another must now receive for his labor a far smaller share of its product than of old suppose the crop be com and the average a yield thirty to the acre worth fifteen dollars one dollar of this or a part of the product would have r paid the rent when the land was valued at ten dollars but now it takes six dollars or two of the entire product but population still and its increase steadily carries up the market value of land until at length the becomes worth three hundred dollars per acre from sheer force of competition and necessity acting upon those who have no land and yet must live now the tenant can no longer to grow com unless he can immensely increase the product or unless he is willing to perform all the labor and run all the risks of hail frost c hints toward and give the entire of a full harvest for the privilege of cultivation it seems to me impossible with land stationary and incapable of increase naturally tending to fewer and fewer hands and population increasing that the of the laboring mass should not become more and more and precarious and their more and more depressed and hopeless for the last half century this tendency has been partially by the invention of labor saving machinery and the immense development of natural and mechanical resources thus it is that the labor now performed in england would have required the best efforts of at least twenty times the present population of that island two centuries ago yet such is the evil influence of the land so fearfully there that though the present laboring class of england accomplish twenty times as much as did their ancestors two centuries back they yet receive a more scanty reward not in money but in the necessaries of life are worse fed lodged more severely worked and hardly better clad nor taught than those ancestors were capital land and machinery takes all the profit of labor to itself the of toil has not increased but the rent and of land have immensely and the number of substantial since the fatal conquest is still sensibly a scotch duke owns a tract miles by while twenty nine of the whole people remain on the island at the good pleasure and of the other and might be driven into exile by that at any time it chose in this country things have come to no such pass as yet thanks to our republican institutions and to the republican spirit which generally pervaded and directed the first on these shores there are portions of our continent where a vicious system of vast of labor tracts of wilderness to some favorite of the british crown or of some provincial governor or the sale of millions of acres at a price by some step mother state to one or more has some portion of the evils whereof unhappy ireland affords the most conspicuous example but in the 