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-holders, the domination of conquering
races, and the practice of attributing to all reformers designs against
property and its owners, though the changes they recommend may really be
of a nature calculated to make the tenure of property more secure than
ever. Even the charge of irreligion has not been found more effective
against the advocates of improvement or change than that of
Agrarianism,--by which is meant hostility to existing property
institutions, and a determination, if possible, to subvert them. Of the
two, the charge of Agrarianism is the more serious, as it implies the
other. A man may be irreligious, and yet a great stickler for property,
because a great owner of it,--or because he is by nature stanchly
conservative, and his infidelity merely a matter of logic. But if there
be any reason for charging a man with Agrarianism, though it be never so
unreasonable a reason, his infidelity is taken for granted, and it would
be labor lost to attempt to show the contrary. Nor is this conclusion so
altogether irrational as it appears at the first sight. Religion is
an ordinance of God, and so is property; and if a man be suspected of
hostility to the latter, why should he not be held positively guilty
towards the former? Every man is religious, though but few men govern
their lives according to religious precepts; but every man not only
loves property and desires to possess it, but allows considerations
growing out of its rights to have a weight on his mind far more grave,
far more productive of positive results, than religion has on the common
person. If there be such a thing as an Agrarian on earth, he would fight
bravely for his land, though it should be of no greater extent than
would suffice him for a grave, according to the strictest measurement