Of that feeling which is known as Agrarianism we believe there is far less in the United States now than there was at the time when Mr. Hamilton was here, and for a few years after that time.  From about the year 1829 to 1841, there was in our politics a large infusion of Socialism.  We then had parties, or factions, based on the distinctions that exist in the social state, and those organizations had considerable influence in our elections.  The Workingmen’s party was a powerful body in several Northern States, and, to an observer who was not familiar with our condition, it well might wear the appearance of an Agrarian body.  No intelligent American, however, fell into such an error.  It was evident to the native observer, that the Workingmen’s party, while aiming at certain reforms which it deemed necessary for the welfare of the laboring classes, had no felonious purposes in view to the prejudice of property,—­and this for the plain reason, that most workingmen were property-owners themselves.  Few of them had much, but still fewer had nothing, and the aggregate of their possessions was immense.  They would have been the greatest losers, had there been a social convulsion, for they would have lost everything.  Then they were intelligent men in the ordinary affairs of life, and knew that the occurrence of any such convulsion would, first of all, cut off, not only their means of acquisition, but the very sources of their livelihood.  Industry wilts under revolutionary movement, as vegetation under the sirocco, and they bring to the multitude anything but a realization of Utopian dreams.  In the long run, there has rarely been a revolution which has not worked beneficially for the mass of mankind; but the earliest effects of every revolution are to them bad, and eminently so.  It is to this fact that we must look for an explanation of the slowness with which the masses move against any existing order of things, even when they are well aware that it treats them with singular injustice.  For nothing can be better established than that no revolution was ever the work of the body of the people,—­of the majority.  Revolutions are made by minorities, by orders, by classes, by individuals, but never by the people.  The people may be dragged into them, but they never take the initiative even in those movements which are called popular, and which are supposed to have only popular ends in view.  That very portion of mankind who are most feared by timid men of property are those who are the last to act in any of the great games which mark the onward course of the world.  Complain they do, and often bitterly, of the inequalities of society, but action is not their strong point.