It is a notorious fact, that in the United States land-jobbing has led to a series of the most nefarious practices, whereby numbers have already suffered, and by which still greater numbers must suffer hereafter. By the machinations of a few interested individuals, who have contrived by various methods to get immense tracts[36] of waste land into their possession, fictitious demands have been created in the market for land, the price of it has consequently been enhanced much beyond its intrinsic worth, and these persons have then taken the opportunity of selling what they had on hand at an enormous profit. The wealth that has been accumulated by particular persons in the United States, in this manner, is prodigious; and numberless others, witnesses to their prosperity, have been tempted to make purchases of land, in hopes of realizing fortunes in a similar way, by selling out small portions at an advanced price. Thus it is that the nominal value of waste land has been raised so suddenly in the United States; for large tracts, which ten years before were selling for a few pence per acre, have sold in numberless instances, lately, for dollars per acre, an augmentation in price which the increase of population alone would by no means have occasioned. Estates, like articles of merchandize, have passed, before they have ever been improved, through the hands of dozens of people, who never perhaps were within five hundred miles of them, and the consumer or farmer, in consequence of the profits laid on by these people, to whom they have severally belonged, has had frequently to pay a most exorbitant price for the little spot which he has purchased[37]. Footnote 36: There have been many instances in the United States of a single individual’s holding upwards of three millions of acres at one time, and some few individuals have been known to hold even twice that quantity at once. Footnote 37: In the beginning of the year 1796, this traffic was at its highest pitch, and at this time General Washington, so eminently distinguished for his prudence and foresight, perceiving that land had risen beyond its actual value, and persuaded that it could not rise higher for some years to come, advertised for sale every acre of which he was possessed, except the farms of Mount Vernon. The event shewed how accurate his judgment was. In the close of the year, one of the great land-jobbers, disappointed in his calculations, was obliged to abscond; the land trade was shaken to its very foundation; bankruptcies spread like wildfire from one great city to another, and men that had begun to build palaces found themselves likely to have no better habitation for a time than the common gaol. [Sidenote: LAND-JOBBING.]