Our position is this: It is the land and money laws of a country that must ever mainly determine the social condition of its people. In other words, without just agrarian and commercial laws--laws that shall establish for all classes equal rights in the soil and equal advantages from the use of money and credit (so as to secure equitable exchange in trade)--no country can be prosperous, be its form of government what it may. Now, in these respects America has but little to boast of over England, France, or any other European country. If she does not exhibit the wide-spread distress that these countries exhibit, she owes it not so much to the superiority of her political institutions (for of these she has as yet but little availed herself), as she does to her unbounded resources (in the extent and fertility of her soil), and to the comparative exemption she enjoys from public and private indebtedness owing to her being a new country. But for these causes--but for the facility with which unappropriated land may be had, and but for the fewness of her territorial and commercial aristocracy as compared with those of older countries--her citizens would very soon exhibit the same hideous extremes of rich and poor as are to be found in Europe. Indeed, New York and some of the New England States (where most of the land is appropriated, and the population crowded) have already, on more than one occasion, exhibited all the worst features of British “civilization”--that is to say, wholesale squalor and destitution (with their necessary consequences) in close proximity to teeming granaries and warehouses; otherwise, an unemployed labouring population, in rags and hunger, within sight of merchant-princes and master-manufacturers worth some hundreds of thousands of dollars each. And why should it be otherwise? The social system is the same there as here. Rents are higher in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, &c., than in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Competition is the same or worse. Wages-slavery is as rife in Massachusets, Pennsylvania, and New York as in any part of the British Isles; and if wages be not quite as low in Philadelphia and Lowell as they are in Manchester and Birmingham, it is partly owing to the high protective duties laid on foreign manufactures, partly to the comparative scarcity of hands, but chiefly to the facility with which the victims of competition can escape from the mills and factories to the backwoods of Indiana, Missouri, &c.