protect the poorer citizen's right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness." The lack of a mechanic's lien law, which would protect his
wages in the case of his employer's bankruptcy, was keenly felt by the
workingmen. A labor paper estimated in 1829 that, owing to the lack of a
lien law on buildings, not less than three or four hundred thousand
dollars in wages were annually lost.

But the most distinctive demands of the workingmen went much further.
This was an age of egalitarianism. The Western frontiersmen demanded
equality with the wealthy Eastern merchant and banker, and found in
Andrew Jackson an ideal spokesman. For a brief moment it seemed that by
equality the workingmen meant an equal division of all property. That
was the program which received temporary endorsement at the first
workingmen's meeting in New York in April 1829. "Equal division" was
advocated by a self-taught mechanic by the name of Thomas Skidmore, who
elaborated his ideas in a book bearing the self-revealing title of "_The
Rights of Man to Property: being a Proposition to make it Equal among
the Adults of the Present Generation: and to Provide for its Equal
Transmission to Every Individual of Each Succeeding Generation, on
Arriving at the Age of Maturity_," published in 1829. This Skidmorian
program was better known as "agrarianism," probably from the title of a
book by Thomas Paine, _Agrarian Justice, as Opposed to Agrarian Law and
to Agrarian Monopoly_, published in 1797 in London, which advocated
equal division by means of an inheritance tax. Its adoption by the New
York workingmen was little more than a stratagem, for their intention
was to forestall any attempts by employers to lengthen the working day
to eleven hours by raising the question of "the nature of the tenure by
which all men hold title to their property." Apparently the stratagem
worked, for the employers immediately dropped the eleven-hour issue.
But, although the workingmen quickly thereafter repudiated agrarianism,