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Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859
Project Gutenberg's Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: March 9, 2004 [EBook #11525]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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 Turki