Every year the young people go from this province and purchase land in the neighboring colonies, while much better and every way more convenient lands lie useless to the king and country. The reason of this is that the grantees themselves are not, nor never were, in a capacity to improve such large tracts, and other people will not become their vassals or tenants, for one great reason, as people's (the better sort especially) leaving their native country, was to avoid the dependence on landlords.
— Report of Cadwalader Golden, Surveyor-General, and afterward Lieutenant-Governor of the Province of New York (1732), Documentary History of New York, Vol. I., p. 384.
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