CONTENTS |
In every work regard the writer's end; Pope. |
This book closes the series of the Littlepage Manuscripts, which havebeen given to the world, as containing a fair account of the comparativesacrifices of time, money and labour, made respectively by the landlordand the tenants, on a New York estate; together with the manner in whichusages and opinions are changing among us; as well as certain of thereasons of these changes. The discriminating reader will probably beable to trace in these narratives the progress of those innovations onthe great laws of morals which are becoming so very manifest inconnection with this interest, setting at naught the plainest principlesthat God has transmitted to man for the government of his conduct, andall under the extraordinary pretence of favouring liberty! In thisdownward course, our picture embraces some of the proofs of thatlooseness of views on the subject of certain species of property whichis, in a degree perhaps, inseparable from the semi-barbarous conditionof a new settlement; the gradation of the squatter, from him who merelymakes his pitch to crop a few fields in passing, to him who car