The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry

by Wendell Berry

Thomas Jefferson, who knew all these things, obviously was thinking of them when he wrote in 1785 that ‘it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state …’ He was saying, two years before the adoption of our Constitution, that a democratic state and democratic liberties depend upon democratic ownership of the land. He was already anticipating and fearing the division of our people into settlers, the people who wanted ‘a little portion of land’ as a home, and, virtually opposite to those, the consolidators and exploiters of the land and the land’s wealth, who would not be restrained by what Jefferson called ‘the natural affection of the human mind.’ He wrote as he did in 1785 because he feared exactly the political theory that we now have: the idea that government exists to guarantee the right of the most wealthy to own or control the land without limit.