"Are you tired of slavery--of drudging for others--of poverty and
its attendant miseries? Then, vote yourself a farm.

"Would you free your country and the sons of toil everywhere from
the heartless, irresponsible mastery of the aristocracy of
avarice? .... Then join with your neighbors to form a true
American party...whose chief measures will be first to limit
the quantity of land that any one may henceforth monopolize or
inherit; and second to make the public lands free to actual
settlers only, each having the right to sell his improvements to
any man not possessed of other lands."

"Vote yourself a farm" became a popular shibboleth and a part of
the standard programme of organized labor. The donation of public
lands to heads of families, on condition of occupancy and
cultivation for a term of years, was proposed in bills repeatedly
introduced in Congress. But the cry of opposition went up from
the older States that they would be bled for the sake of the
newer, that giving land to the landless was encouraging idleness
and wantonness and spreading demoralization, and that Congress
had no more power to give away land than it had to give away
money. These arguments had their effect at the Capitol, and it
was not until the new Republican party came into power pledged to
"a complete and satisfactory homestead measure" that the
Homestead Act of 1862 was placed on the statute books.

A characteristic manifestation of the humanitarian impulse of the
forties was the support given to labor in its renewed demand for
a ten-hour day. It has already been indicated how this movement
started in the thirties, how its object was achieved by a few