one
thought of impairing the force of the covenants under which the parties
held. The most trivial observer will soon discover that it is only when
something is to be gained that the aggrieved citizen wishes to disturb a
covenant. Now, I never heard any one say a syllable against either of
the covenants of his lease under which he held his farm, let him be ever
so loud against those which would shortly compel him to give it up! Had
I complained of the fact--and such facts abounded--that my predecessors
had incautiously let farms at such low prices that the lessees had been
enabled to pay the rents for half a century by subletting small portions
of them, as my uncle Ro had intimated, I should be pointed at as a
fool. "Stick to your bond" would have been the cry, and "Shylock" would
have been forgotten. I do not say that there is not a vast difference
between the means of acquiring intelligence, the cultivation, the
manners, the social conditions, and, in some senses, the social
obligations of an affluent landlord and a really hard-working, honest,
well-intentioned husbandman, his tenant--differences that should dispose
the liberal and cultivated gentleman to bear in mind the advantages he
has perhaps inherited, and not acquired by his own means, in such a way
as to render him, in a certain degree, the repository of the interests
of those who hold under him; but, while I admit all this, and say that
the community which does not possess such a class of men is to be
pitied, as it loses one of the most certain means of liberalizing and
enlarging its notions, and of improving its civilization, I am far from
thinking that the men of this class are to have their real superiority
of position, with its consequences, thrown into their faces only when
they are expected to give, while they are grudgingly denied it on all
other occasions! There is nothing so likely to advance the habits,
opinions, and true interests of a rural population, as to have them all
directed by the intelligence and combined interests that ought to mark
the connection between landlord and tenant. It may do for one class of
political economists to prate about a state of things which supposes
every husbandman a freeholder, and rich enough to maintain his level
among the other freeholders of the State. But we all know that as many
minute gradations in means must and do exist in a community, as there
exists gradations in characters. A majority soon will, in the nat