mi-barbarous condition
of a new settlement; the gradation of the squatter, from him who merely
makes his pitch to crop a few fields in passing, to him who carries on
the business by wholesale; and last, though not least in this catalogue
of marauders, the anti-renter.

It would be idle to deny that the great principle which lies at the
bottom of anti-rentism, if principle it can be called, is the
assumption of a claim that the interests and wishes of numbers are to be
respected, though done at a sacrifice of the clearest rights of the few.
That this is not liberty, but tyranny in its worst form, every
right-thinking and right-feeling man must be fully aware. Every one who
knows much of the history of the past, and of the influence of classes,
must understand, that whenever the educated, the affluent and the
practised, choose to unite their means of combination and money to
control the political destiny of a country, they become irresistible;
making the most subservient tools of those very masses who vainly
imagine _they_ are the true guardians of their own liberties. The
well-known election of 1840 is a memorable instance of the power of such
a combination; though that was a combination formed mostly for the mere
purposes of faction, sustained perhaps by the desperate designs of the
insolvents of the country. Such a combination was necessarily wanting in
union among the affluent; it had not the high support of principles to
give it sanctity, and it affords little more than the proof of the power
of money and leisure, when applied in a very doubtful cause, in wielding
the masses of a great nation, to be the instruments of their own
subjection. No well-intentioned American legislator, consequently, ought
ever to lose sight of the fact, that each invasion of the right which he
sanctions is a blow struck against liberty itself, which, in a country
like this, has no auxiliary so certain or so powerful as justice.

The State of New York contains about 43,000 square miles of land; or
something like 27,000,000 of acres. In 1783, its population must have
been about 200,000 souls. With such a proportion between people and
surface it is unnecessary to prove that the husbandman was not quite as
dependent on the landholder, as the landholder was dependent on the
husbandman. This would have been true, had the State been an island; but
we all know it was surrounded by many other communities similarly
situated, and that nothing else w