24 The Environmental Debate
courting the industry of the husbandman. Is it best
then that all our citizens should be employed in its
improvement, or that one half should be called off
from that to exercise manufactures and handicraft
arts for the other? Those who labour in the earth
are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a cho-
sen people, whose breasts He has made His peculiar
deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the
focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which
otherwise might escape from the face of the earth.
Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a
phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has fur-
nished an example.... While we have land to labour
then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied
at a work-bench, or twirling a distaff. Carpenters,
masons, smiths, are wanting in husbandry; but,
for the general operations of manufacture, let our
work-shops remain in Europe.
B. To Benjamin Austin, 1816
We must now place the manufacturer by
the side of the agriculturalist.... The grand
inquiry now is, shall we make our own com-
forts, or go without them at the will of a for-
eign nation? He, therefore, who is now against
domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us
either to dependence on that foreign nation,
or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild
beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of
these. Experience has taught me that manufac-
tures are now as necessary to our independence
as to our comfort.Source: A. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of
Virginia (London: Stockdale, 1786), pp. 273-75. B. Thomas
Jefferson Randolph, ed., Memoirs, Correspondence, and
Private Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 4 (London:
Colburn and Bentley, 1829), p. 279.Document 21: James Madison on Population and Property (1786, 1787/1788)
One of the drafters of the U.S. Constitution, James Madison, devoted much thought to the issue of private
property ownership. Among his concerns were how an increase in the population of the country would affect
the equitable distribution of land and the divisions that would develop as a result of ownership of property or
the lack thereof.A. To Thomas Jefferson, June 19, 1786
I have no doubt but that the misery of the
lower classes will be found to abate wherever the
Government assumes a freer aspect, & the laws
favor a subdivision of property, yet I suspect that
the difference will not fully account for the com-
parative comfort of the mass of people in the
United States. Our limited population has prob-
ably as large a share in producing this effect as
the political advantages which distinguish us. A
certain degree of misery seems inseparable from
a high degree of populousness. If the lands in
Europe which are now dedicated to the amuse-
ment of the idle rich, were parcelled out among
the idle poor, I readily conceive the happy revo-
lution which would be experienced by a certain
proportion of the latter. But still would there
not remain a great proportion unrelieved? No
problem in political economy has appeared to
me more puzzling than that which relates to the
most proper distribution of the inhabitants of a
country fully peopled. Let the lands be shared
among them ever so wisely, & let them be sup-
plied with labourers ever so plentifully; as there
must be a great surplus of subsistence, there
will also remain a great surplus of inhabitants,
a greater by far than will be employed in cloath-
ing both themselves & those who feed them,
and in administering to both, every other neces-
sary & even comfort of life. What is to be done
with this surplus? Hitherto we have seen them
distributed into manufactures of superfluities,
idle proprietors of productive lands, domestics,
soldiers, merchants, mariners, and a few other