stubbornly insisted upon a tenantry, and as obstinately contested any
forfeiture of what they deemed their property rights.

FEUDAL TENURES ABOLISHED.

A long series of reprisals and an intense agitation developed. The
Anti-Renters mustered such sympathetic political strength and threw the
whole state into such a vortex of radical discussion, that the
politicians of the day, fearing the effects of such a movement,
practically forced the manorial magnates to compromise by selling their
land in small farms,[68] which they did at exorbitant prices. They made
large profits on the strength of the very movement which they had so
bitterly opposed. Affrighted at the ominous unrest of a large part of
the people and hoping to stem it, the New York Constitutional Convention
in 1846 adopted a Constitutional inhibition on all feudal tenures, an
inhibition so drafted that no legislature could pass a law contravening
it.[69]

So, in this final struggle, passed away the last vestiges of the sway of
the all-powerful patroons of old. They had become archaic. It was
impossible for them to survive in the face of newer conditions, for they
represented a bygone economic and social era. Their power was one
accruing purely from the extent of their possessions and discriminative
laws. When these were wrenched from their grasp, their importance as
wielders of wealth and influence ceased. They might still boast of their
lineage, their aristocratic enclosure and culture and their social
altitude, but these were about the only remnants of consolation left.

The time was unpropitious for the continuation of great wealth based
upon rural or small-town land. Many influences conspired to make this
land a variable property, while these same influences, or a part of
them, fixed upon city land an enhancing and graduating permanency of
value. The growth of the shipping trade built up the cities and
attracted workers and population generally. The establishment of the
factory system in 1790 had a two-fold effect. It began to drain country
sections of many of the younger generations and it immediately enlarged
the trading activities of the cities. Another and much more considerable
part of the farming population in the East was constantly migrating to
the West and Southwest with their promising opportunities. Some country
districts thinned out; others remained stationary. But whether the rural
census increased or not, there were other factors which sen