Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859

Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18,
April, 1859

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Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: March 9, 2004 [EBook #11525]
Language: English
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ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. III.--APRIL, 1859.--NO. XVIII.

AGRARIANISM.
If we can believe an eminent authority, in which we are disposed to
place great trust, the oldest contest that has divided society is that
which has so long been waged between the House of HAVE and the

House of WANT. It began before the bramble was chosen king of the
trees, and it has outlasted the cedars of Lebanon. We find it going on
when Herodotus wrote his History, and the historians of the nineteenth
century will have to continue writing of the actions of the parties to it.
There seems never to have been a time when it was not old, or a race
that was not engaged in it, from the Tartars, who cook their meat by
making saddle-cloths of it, to the Sybarites, impatient of crumpled
rose-leaves. Spartan oligarchs and Athenian democrats, Roman
patricians and Roman plebeians, Venetian senators and Florentine
_ciompi_, Norman nobles and Saxon serfs, Russian boyars and Turkish
spahis. Spanish hidalgos and Aztec soldiers, Carolina slaveholders and
New England farmers,--these and a hundred other races or orders have
all been parties to the great, the universal struggle which has for its
object the acquisition of property, the providing of a shield against the
ever-threatening fiend which we call WANT. Property once obtained,
the possessor's next aim is to keep it. The very fact, that the mode of
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 of the potter's field. Would every honest believer do as
much for his religion?
But what is Agrarianism, and who are Agrarians? Though the words
are used as glibly as the luring party-terms of the passing year, it is no
very easy matter to define them. Indeed, it is by no means an easy thing
to affix a precise and definite meaning to any political terms, living or
dead. Let the reader endeavor to give a clear and intelligible definition
of Whig and Tory, Democrat and Republican, Guelph and Ghibelline,
Cordelier