Landless

“ The overseer chuckled grimly. "It's that fellow Landless who angered her once before," he said to himself with a malicious grin. "Well, 't is n't my business to know which of all the servants on this plantation she most dislikes to come near her. She 'll have to put up with him to-day. There is n't a better boatman on the place anyhow."
To Landless he said, "Bring the Bluebird up to the wharf, and see that she is sweet and clean inside. Mistress Patricia starts for Rosemead in half an hour, and you and Regulus are to take her. You 'll bring the boat back to-night. ”

“ But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God—so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! ”

“ The idea of a homestead now became an obsession with me. As a proletariat I knew the power of the landlord and the value of land. My love of the wilderness was increasing year by year, but all desire to plow the wild land was gone. My desire for a home did not involve a lonely cabin in a far-off valley, on the contrary I wanted roads and bridges and neighbors. My hope now was to possess a minute isle of safety in the midst of the streaming currents of western life—a little solid ground in my native valley on which the surviving members of my family could catch and cling. ”

“ And, as though you lost no small quantity of ground by forests, chases, lands, and parks, those good holy men turn all dwelling places and all glebe lands into desolation and wilderness, enclosing many thousands acres of ground together within one pale or hedge," while those who formerly lived on the land, "poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, and woeful mothers with young babes, were starving and homeless. And where many labourers had existed by field labour, only a single shepherd or herdsman was occupied."—Utopia, book i. ”

“ To the landowners in the House of Peers we say:—It is on the land question, my lords, that the people challenge you, at present in sorrow and shame. Take up the matter while you may, and do justice while yet you can. The world is wide for you to seek your pleasure, the poor can only seek life—where death finds them—at home. Give up your battues, your red deer, your black game, your pheasants, your partridges; and when you see each acre of land won by the fierce suasion of hardy toil to give life and hope to the tiller, in this you will find your recompense. ”

“ Imagine a broad plantation stretching its sunny acres from river to forest, a vast and lonely area with no signs of human occupancy anywhere, except, perhaps, the toil-bent figures of a few bondservants of the soil at their tasks in the fields, under the eye of the overseer, lending by the unjoyous monotony of their labor an air of gloom and melancholy to the oppressive loneliness of the scene. ”

“ Hunger and exhaustion prevented full appreciation of the scene; nothing could stand in the way of quickly finding a suitable place to rest our weak and jaded bodies, under the shelter of the higher hills round the plateau, or in some depression in the ground. I was anxious to push across the plateau, and descend on the N.E. side to some lower altitude where we should more probably find fuel, but my men, half-starved and fagged, could go no farther. ”

“ There is a strange fascination in the idea, "Wheresoever my horse wanders there is my home;" stronger perhaps is that thought than any allurement of wealth, or power, or possession given us by life. Nor can after-time ever wholly remove it; midst the smoke and hum of cities, midst the prayer of churches, in street or salon, it needs but little cause to recall again to the wanderer the image of the immense meadows where, far away at the portals of the setting sun, lies the Great Lone Land. ”

“ Settlement is still but a fringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals and corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyond the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and pack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler. ”

“ These are the men who only one year before had been living in comfortable homes, with several hundred acres of good ground under cultivation, and “clamoring for certificates” of their “allotted” farms—now shelterless, worse than homeless, escaping by canoe-loads, under fire of United States soldiers, from a barren desert, and “clamoring” for food at Indian agencies! ”

“ For nearly two years my six motherless children, between the tender ages of six and fifteen, have been inhumanly forced into the solitary wilderness—nine months of the time dwelling in a tent, and the remainder in a floorless log-cabin—often without flour, meal, or meat, and surrounded by savages of the fiercest tribes. From easy competence reduced to want, banishment, and the severest inclemencies of a northern climate! ”

“ Behold, you far-off lights,—
⁠From smoke-veiled heights,
If there be dwelling in our wilderness!
⁠For Love the refugee,
⁠No stronghold can there be,—
No shelter more, while these go shelterless. ”

“ A land unpolluted by the groans of starving millions. A land which opens her fostering arms to receive and restore to his long lost birthright, the trampled and abused child of poverty: to bid him stand up a free inheritor of a free soil, who so long laboured for a scanty pittance of bread, as an ignorant and degraded slave, in the country to which you now cling with such passionate fondness, and leave with such heart-breaking regret. ”

“ Years ago, when the supply of government land had seemed inexhaustible, the tide of settlers had swept around the forgotten frontier, on beyond the arid and semi-arid land to the fertile soil and the gold fields on the Pacific Coast. But the time had come when this neglected prairie was the only land left for a land-hungry people. ”

“ To turn and leave our land now, it seems to me, would make us too much like those soulless soil-robbers you used to rail at, like those squatters who’ve merely squeezed 45 out what they could and have gone on, like those land-miners who take all they can get and stand ready to put nothing back. ”

“ They drive away the ass of the fatherless, they take the widow's ox for a pledge.
They turn the needy out of the way; the poor of the earth hide themselves together.
Behold, as wild asses in the desert they go forth to their work, seeking diligently for meat; the wilderness yieldeth them food for their children. ”

“ We do not marvel that the land-acquiring passion becomes a mania among our farmers, and particularly we do not wonder at a passion for wood land. That wide, deep chasm of conscious self-poverty and emptiness which lies at the bottom of every human heart, making men crave property as something to add to one's own bareness, and to ballast one's own specific levity, is sooner filled by land than any thing else.
Your hoary New England farmer walks over his acres with a grim satisfaction. ”

“ But the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without inhabitants,—all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. ”

“ Who doubts that such a population might be sustained on the fat valleys of the interior and the plantations of the south country, even though the waste places of the wilderness were left out of the account as utterly unfit for the dwelling-places of men? And, as though this vast heritage of ours were not enough for a free and industrious people, God has over many portions of the land practically doubled its area ”

“ We looked back upon the scene of destruction, from which we had so recently escaped, with mingled feelings of dismay and gratitude. Our deliverance, indeed, was not yet complete. Alas! who could tell whether,—“having escaped the sea,—vengeance might yet suffer us to live?” “The perils of the wilderness” lay before us in all their unknown horrors of toil, and thirst, and frightful famine. ”

“ And in Fancy’s realms my drooping thoughts pass on to those homeless wanderers over the face of the earth, for whom never more the scenes of their first homes will wear a charm—who, torn from all familiar ties, and tossed and buffeted on the sea of life, may perish unregarded in some far-distant land. The surging crests of the great ocean’s waves oft cast, to moulder on our shores, the weeds and plants of other climes. ”

“ To-day it is the sense of being in the country of the nomads, the tent-dwellers, the masters of innumerable flocks and herds, whose wealth goes wandering from pasture to pasture, bleating and lowing and browsing and multiplying over the open moorland beneath the blue sky. ”

“ I have always experienced a feeling of devout thankfulness never to have possessed a square yard of that perverse commodity called "land." But I will confess that, travelling in the East African Highlands for the first time in my life, I have learned what the sensation of land-hunger is like. ”

“ Land-hunger will force a solution of the land problem. The time for dissertations on abstract justice is past. It is to stimulate the land-hunger that I have made bold to trouble readers of this column with so frank a statement of my personal affairs at the present time. If you are looking ahead with terror to the long winter, you should make up your mind that before another winter comes you will be as well provided for as I am, with the fruits of your own labour on the land. ”

“ They have remained crowded in a city, of which the bite, as chosen by themselves, has betrayed their lamentable ignorance, clinging together, and fancying themselves rich and honorable from the possession of a few uncultivated acres of land, while we have spread ourselves through the whole region, leaving not a foot of land unexplored or a resource untried ”

“ You will soon find one; but your land—which is our land too—will become a desert. Poor land! If you destroy its shrines and sanctuaries you will destroy its soul; for they are the soul of the land. The first inhabitants gathered round the sanctuary, and on that sanctuary and the gods that dwell there the peasant founds his hopes of increase on what he sows and plants, and of prosperity for his wife and children and cattle and all that he has. ”

“ But the rural landskip is not solely made up of land, and water, and trees, and birds, and beasts; man is a distinguished figure in it; his multiplied occupations and concerns introduce themselves into every part of it; he intermixes even in the wildest and rudest scenes, and throws a life and interest upon every surrounding object. ”

“ And in the twelve miles you pass as many towns as you do lakes; one for every three miles: all clean, and flourishing: and not a dilapidated hovel in a land where nothing is grown but grass, and where there are nine months of winter and three of cold, with the exception of a few such days as was to-day! This absence of visible poverty adds much to the sense of satisfaction with which you contemplate the scene. ”

“ No land is bad, but land is worse. If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare. Every tree and graft, every hill of melons, row of corn, or quickset hedge, all he has done, and all he means to do, stand in his way, like duns, when he would go out of his gate. ”

“ On the contrary, everywhere extend wild naked hills, in many places totally unreclaimed; in others, enclosed, but exhibiting all the signs of a neglected and spiritless husbandry; with stunted fences or stone walls; and fields sodden with wet from want of drainage, and consequently overgrown with rushes. Over these naked and desolate hills are scattered to their very tops, in all directions, the habitations of a swarming population of weavers; the people and their houses equally unparticipant of those features which delight the poet and the painter. ”

“ Independence, the focusing point of the frontier life, housing unexpected hundreds, dripped from all its gables and swam in mud. And in the camps that spread through the fresh, wet woods and the oozy uplands, still other hundreds cowered under soaked tent walls and in damp wagon boxes, listening to the rush of the continuous showers. ”

“ How many cubic feet of air have our men had to breathe in the wretched and monotonous tenements in which they were compelled to live? Houses must be built that way, I am told, because the land is dear. ”

“ There was some green grass round about where we camped, or, more properly speaking, where we lay, for we did not erect our little tent,—but the poor starving animals did not eat a bite of it, but stood over us as if in sympathy with us in our deplorable condition. ”

“ Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. ”

“ He has been so accustomed to the glad, free air of the plains and mountains that the hampered and false life of a throbbing city, with its myriad industries, makes him nervous and unhappy. He sighs for the boundless prairie and the pure breath of the lifegiving mountain atmosphere. ”

“ They are nearly all night workers, finding the days too hot and white. In mid-desert where there are no cattle, there are no birds of carrion, but if you go far in that direction the chances are that you will find yourself shadowed by their tilted wings. Nothing so large as a man can move unspied upon in that country, and they know well how the land deals with strangers. There are hints to be had here of the way in which a land forces new habits on its dwellers. ”