PRACTICAL VIEWS--SAFETY OF INVESTMENTS IN LAND.
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 any thing 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.