Now, do you mean to tell me, that for thousands of years there were farms waiting the pioneers here in North America? Consider for a moment what the New England, or the Southern, or the Western farmer had to do before he had _made a farm_. He had to go into the woods with an axe in one hand and a rifle in the other. Very frequently he was shot down before he could make his farm, just as Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather was killed. Very frequently he died from the fever engendered in the woods before he had made his farm, just as Andrew Jackson’s father did, in the effort _to make a farm_ in the wilderness of North Carolina. Supposing the farmer was able to snatch up his gun quick enough to shoot the Indian who was trying to shoot him, and supposing that his constitution was strong enough to resist the malarial atmosphere in which he had to labor while creating that farm, what was the process through which he went _in making that farm_? He had to cut off an enormous growth of timber. He had to grub up stumps and roots. He had to plow and cross-plow the soil until it had become a seed bed. He had to inclose the farm to keep out the wild animals which would have devoured his crop. If in a rocky section, he had to remove the stones which encumbered the ground. If in a damp, swampy section, he had to exercise skill, as well as labor, in draining the soil. After four or five years, the laborer _had made a farm_—something _as different from the wild land which he found in the woods as the pine tree is from the lumber which lies upon the lumber-yard_; as different as the wool on the sheep’s back is from the coat which you wear; something as different as the willow and the bamboo are from the chairs and the baskets which are made from them. Now, the doctrinaires say that it would be a sufficient reward to that laborer _to give him the crop that he made on the land_. Would it? For what length of time will you give him those crops? If you ask the laborer, he will say, “_I made this farm_; I risked my life in the work: I shortened my days by the labor, the exposure, the drudgery of making this farm. I never would have gone to this amount of toil if I had not believed that society would secure me in the possession of the farm after I made it.”