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There was not a particle of romance in my
aspirations for a farm, neither had I formed a single visionary theory
which was there to be tested. My notions were all sober and prosaic. I had
struggled all my life for dollars, because abundance of them produces
pecuniary comfort: and the change to country life was to be, in reality, a
mere continuation of the struggle, but lightened by the assurance that if
the dollars thus to be acquired were fewer in number, the certainty of
earning enough of them was likely to be greater. Crops might fail under
skies at one time too watery, at another too brassy, but no such disaster
could equal those to which commercial pursuits are uninterruptedly
exposed. They have brassy skies above them as well as farmers. For nearly
twenty years I had been hampered with having notes of my own or of other
parties to pay; but of all the farmers I had visited only one had ever
given a note, and he had made a vow never to give another. My wife was
shrewd enough to observe and remark on this fact at the time, it was so
different from my own experience. She admitted
there must be some satisfaction in carrying on a business which did not
require the giving of notes.
Looking at the matter of removal to the country in a
practical light, I found that in the city I was paying three hundred
dollars per annum rent for a dwelling-house. It was the interest of five
thousand dollars; yet it afforded nothing but a shelter for my family. I
might continue to pay that rent for fifty years, without, at the end of
that time, having acquired the ownership of either a stone upon the
chimney, or a shingle in the roof. If the house rose in value, the rise
would be to the owner's benefit, not to mine. It would really be injurious
to me, as the rise would lead him to demand an increase of his rent. But
put the value of the house into a farm, or even the half of it—the farm
would have a dwelling-house upon it, in which my family would find as good
a shelter, while the land, if cultivated as industriously as I had always
cultivated business, would belie the flood of evidence I had been studying
for many years, if it failed to yield to my efforts the returns which it
was manifestly returning to others. We could live contentedly on a
thousand dollars a year, and here we should have no landlord to pay. My
wife, in pinching times, has financiered us through the year on several
hundred less. I confess to having lived as well on the diminished rations
as I wanted to. Indeed, until one tries it for himself, it is incredible
what dignity there is in an old hat, what virtue in a time-worn coat, and
how savory the dinner-table can be made without sirloin steaks or
cranberry tarts.
Thus, let it be remembered, my views and
aspirations had no tinge of extravagance. My rule was moderation. The
tortures of a city struggle without capital, had sobered me down to being
contented with a bare competency. I might fail in some particulars at the
outset, from ignorance, but I was in the prime of life, strong, active,
industrious, and tractable, and what I did not know I could soon learn
from others, for farmers have no secrets. Then I had seen too much of the
uncertainty of banks and stocks, and ledger accounts, and promissory
notes, to be willing to invest anything in either as a permanency. At best
they are fluctuating and uncertain, up to-day and down to-morrow. My great
preference had always been for land.
In looking around among my wide circle of city
acquaintances, especially among the older families, I could not fail to
notice that most of them had grown rich by the ownership of land. More
than once had I seen the values of all city property, improved and
unimproved, apparently disappear;— lots without purchasers, and houses
without tenants, the community so poor and panic-stricken that real estate
became the merest drug. Yesterday the collapse was caused by the
destruction of the National Bank; to-day it is the Tariff. Sheriffs played
havoc with houses and lands incumbered by mortgages, and lawyers fattened
on the rich harvest of fees inaugurated by a Bankrupt Law. But those who,
undismayed by the wreck around them, courageously held on to land,
came through in safety. The storm, having run its course and exhausted its
wrath, gave place to skies commercially serene, and real estate swung back
with an irrepressible momentum to its former value, only to keep on
advancing to one even greater.
I became convinced that safety lay in the ownership
of land. In all my inquiries both before leaving the city, as well as
since, I rarely heard of a farmer becoming insolvent. When I did, and was
careful to ascertain the cause, it turned out that he had either begun in
debt, and was thus hampered at the beginning, or had made bad bargains in
speculations outside of his calling, or wasted his means in riotous
living, or had in some way utterly neglected his business. If not made
rich by heavy crops, I could find none who had been made poor by bad ones.
The reader may look back over every monetary
convulsion he may be able to remember, and he will find that in all of
them the agricultural community came through with less disaster than any
other interest. Wheat grows and corn ripens though all the banks in the
world may break, for seed-time and harvest is one of the divine promises
to man, never to be broken, because of its divine origin. They grew and
ripened before banks were invented, and will continue to do so when banks
and railroad bonds shall have become obsolete.
Moreover, the earthly fund for whose acquisition
we are all striving, we naturally desire to make a permanent one.
As we have worked for it, so we trust that it will work for us and our
children. Its value, whatever that may be, depends on its perpetuity—the
continuance of its existence. A man seeks to earn what will support and
serve not only himself, but his posterity. He would naturally desire to
have the estate descend to children and grandchildren. This is one great
object of his toil. What, then, is the safest fund in which to invest, in
this country? What is the only fund which the experience of the last fifty
years has shown, with very few exceptions, would be absolutely safe as a
provision for heirs? How many men, within that period, assuming to act as
trustees for estates, have kept the trust fund invested in stocks, and
when distributing the principal among the heirs, have found that most of
it had vanished! Under corporate insolvency it had melted into air. No
prudent man, accepting such a trust, and guaranteeing its integrity,
would invest the fund in stocks.
Our country is filled with pecuniary
wrecks from causes like this. Thousands trust themselves during their
lifetime, to manage this description of property, confident of their
caution and sagacity. With close watching and good luck, they may be equal
to the task; but the question still occurs as to the probable
duration of such a fund in families. What is its safety when invested in
the current stocks of the country? and next,
what is its safety in the hands of heirs? There are no statistics showing
the probable
continuance of estates in land in families, and of estates composed of
personal property, such as stocks. But every bank cashier will testify to
one remarkable fact—that an heir no sooner inherits stock in the bank than
the first thing he generally does is to sell and transfer it, and that
such sale is most frequently the first notice given of the holder's death.
This preference for investment in real estate will
doubtless be objected to by the young and dashing business man. But lands,
or a fund secured by real estate, is unquestionably not only the highest
security, but in the hands of heirs it is the only one likely to survive
a single generation. Hence the wisdom of the common law, which neither
permits the guardian to sell the lands of his ward, nor even the court, in
its discretion, to grant authority for their sale, except upon sufficient
grounds shown,— as a necessity for raising a fund for the support and
education of the ward. Even a lord chancellor can only touch so sacred a
fund for this or similar reasons. The common law is wise on this subject,
as on most others. It is thus the experience and observation of mankind
that such a fund is the safest, and hence the provisions of the law.
Those, therefore, who acquire personal property,
acquire only what will last about a generation, longer or shorter. Such
property is quickly converted into money—it perishes and is gone. But land
is hedged round with numerous guards which protect it from hasty
spoliation. It is not so easily transferred; it
is not so secretly transferred; the law enjoins deliberate formalities
before it can be alienated, and often the consent of various parties is
necessary. When all other guards give way, early memories of parental
attachment to these ancestral acres, or tender reminiscences of
childhood, will come in to stay the spoliation of the homestead, and make
even the prodigal pause before giving up this portion of his inheritance.
Throughout Europe a passion to become the owner of
land is universal, while the difficulty of gratifying it is infinitely
greater than with us. It is there enormously dear; here it is absurdly
cheap. It is from this universal passion that the vast annual immigration
to this country derives its mighty impulse. As it reaches our shores it
spreads itself over the country in search of cheap land. Many of the most
flourishing Western States have been built up by the astonishing influx of
immigrants. In England, every landowner is prompt to secure every freehold
near him, be it large or small, as it comes into market. Hence the number
of freeholders in that country is annually diminishing by this process of
absorption. This European passion for acquiring land is strangely
contrasted with the American passion for parting with it.
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