suppress all undue
initiative on his part.

THE MANORIAL LORDS MONOPOLIZE TRADE.

This was especially so in New York, where all power was concentrated in
the hands of a few landowners. "To say," says Sabine, "that the
political institutions of New York formed a feudal aristocracy is to
define them with tolerable accuracy. The soil was owned by a few. The
masses were mere retainers or tenants as in the monarchies of
Europe."[31] The feudal lord was also the dominant manufacturer and
trader. He forced his tenants to sign covenants that they should trade
in nothing else than the produce of the manor; that they should trade
nowhere else but at his store; that they should grind their flour at his
mill, and buy bread at his bakery, lumber at his sawmills and liquor at
his brewery. Thus he was not only able to squeeze the last penny from
them by exorbitant prices, but it was in his power to keep them
everlastingly in debt to him. He claimed, and held, a monopoly in his
domain of whatever trade he could seize. These feudal tenures were
established in law; woe to the tenant who presumed to infract them! He
became a criminal and was punished as a felon. The petty merchant could
not, and dared not, compete with the trading monopolies of the manorial
lords within these feudal jurisdictions. In such a system the merchant's
place for a century and a half was a minor one, although far above that
of the drudging laborer. Merchants resorted to sharp and frequently
dubious ways of getting money together. They bargained and sold
shrewdly, kept their wits ever open, turned sycophant to the aristocracy
and a fleecer of the laborer.

It would appear that in New York, at least, the practice of the most
audacious usury was an early and favorite means of acquiring the
property of others. These others were invariably the mechanic or
laborer; the merchant dared not attempt to overreach the aristocrat
whose power he had good reason to fear. Money which was taken in by
selling rum and by wheedling the unsophisticated Indians into yielding
up valuable furs, was loaned at frightfully onerous rates. The loans
unpaid, the lender swooped mercilessly upon the property of the
unfortunate and gathered it in.

The richest merchant of his period in the province of New York was
Cornelius Steenwyck, a liquor merchant, who died in 1686. He left a
total estate of L4,382 and a long list of book debts which disclosed
that almost every man in New York City