Project Gutenberg's Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859, by Various

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859
[Date last updated: August 7, 2005]

Author: Various

Release Date: March 9, 2004 [EBook #11525]

Language: English

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ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. III.--APRIL, 1859.--NO. XVIII.

AGRARIANISM.

If we can believe an eminent authority, in which we are disposed to
place great trust, the oldest contest that has divided society is that
which has so long been waged between the House of HAVE and the House of
WANT. It began before the bramble was chosen king of the trees, and it
has outlasted the cedars of Lebanon. We find it going on when Herodotus
wrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth century will
have to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it. There
seems never to have been a time when it was not old, or a race that
was not engaged in it, from the Tartars, who cook their meat by
making saddle-cloths of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpled
rose-leaves. Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman patricians
and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine _ciompi_, Norman
nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish spahis, Spanish
hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and New England
farmers,--these and a hundred other races or orders have all been
parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its object
the acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against the
ever-threatening fiend which we call WANT. Property once obtained, the
possessor's next aim is to keep it. The very fact, that the mode of
acquisition may have been wrong, and subversive of property-rights, if
suffered to be imitated, naturally makes its possessor suspicious and
cruel. He fears that the measure he has meted to others may be meted to
him again. Hence severe laws, the monopoly of political power and of
political offices by property-holder