accepted the need for a permanent class of wage earners. "Can it be," Carey asked, "that a beneficent Providence has so adjusted the laws under which we live that laborers must be at the mercy of those who hoard food and clothing with which to purchase labor?" Raymond, appealing to Locke's contention that "individual right to property is never absolute," advocated a protective tariff and other measures designed to promote manufactures, but he rejected Adam Smith's argument in favor of human acquisitiveness as the motor of social progress. Acquisitiveness led to an increasingly complex division of labor, as Raymond pointed out, and thus widened the gulf between the propertied and the laboring classes. "Labor's independence," as Allen Kaufman summarizes Raymond's thinking, rested on labor's "technical know-how" and its "ownership of the means of production."

Those who opposed the more and more militant demands made by artisans in the I830s and I840s did not quarrel with the claim that wage labor was a form of slavery. They merely denied that a permanent wage‐ earning class was taking shape in the United States. "In this favoured land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all," as one of them put it, "and the journeymen may by their skill and industry, and moral worth, soon become flourishing master mechanics." Americans took it as axiomatic, a cherished article of political faith, that freedom had to rest on the broad distribution of property ownership. In debates about universal suffrage, opponents of a restricted suffrage conceded the dangers of universal suffrage in societies marked by extremes of wealth and poverty. In the New York constitutional convention of 1821, in which the suffrage question was extensively debated, one speaker after another made this point. David Buel, a delegate from Rensselaer County, pointed out that in England, land was monopolized by the rich, while the "great bulk of the population" was poor. "Did I believe that our population would degenerate into such a state, I should ... hesitate in extending the right of suffrage; but I confess I have no such fears." Property qualifications were necessary, according to John Ross of Genesee County, only where property was concentrated in the hands of the few and therefore threatened by the many. In the United States, where property was "infinitely divided," the danger had "ceased to exist." Even laborers, Ross said, "expect the most of them soon to become freeholders." According to Martin Van Buren, those excluded under the existing restrictions were

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