Democratic Sentinel, Volume 8, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 April 1884 — CURSE OF LAND MONOPOLY. [ARTICLE]

CURSE OF LAND MONOPOLY.

■The Shameful Way in Which Our Public Domain Has Been Squandered. I Evils of the Land Grant System Shown Up by Hon. William S. Hohnan. During the debate in the National iHouse of Representatives on the Post- | office appropropriation bill, the Hon. IW. S. Holman, of Indiana, exhibited I tables, compiled from official reports, I showing that in the period embraced I between June 30, 1862, and March 4, I 187&, the enormous aggregate of nearly I two hundred million acres of our pubI lie lands had been voted away by UonI .gress in aid of railways, the total I length of the railroads for which the grants were made being 20,803 miles. Mr. Holman, in discussing this matter, spoke as follows: What are the conditions on which these grants were made? What rights has the Gov- ' ernment reserved in giving away the common wealth of its people? There are some reservations, two of them, meager and inconsiderable, 1 admit, but still something. In all of these grants, running through all these years, these are the conditions, varied somewhat in terms but still substantially the same: “And the said railroad shall be and remain 41 public highway for the use of the Government of the United States, free from all toll or other charges upon the transportation ot -any property or troops of the United States." This Is the first right Reserved to the Government, and even here in the beginning is a fradulent purpose. Undoubtedly Congress understood by those terms that the railroad should transport the “property and troops” of the United States free of charge, but you -Observe a slight ambiguity in the language, -and under this ambiguity the Supreme Court has decided that the Government has the right to put its own locomotives and cars on these irailroads and by Its own employes transport Its property and troops free (which of course is impracticable); but if the railroad transports the Government’s property and troops, then the Government shall pay the railroad -company 50 per cent, of the usual rates of transportation. This was decided in the case •Of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Kailroad Company vs. The United States, and yet the land grant to that company was made four years after Congress had, by a joint resolution I had the honor to introduce in 1862, ■declared that the meaning of the terms employed in that reservation was that the landgrant corporation “should transport the property and troops of the United States free •of charge.” The other right reserved in all these grants is in less ambiguous language and in all the ■same in substance: “The said railroad shall transport the mails ■of the United States at such price as Congress shall by law direct.” Now, these two provisions cover all the rights reserved to the United States in consideration of these imperial grants'. Contrary to the manifest intention of Congress, these corporations have under the extraordinary decision I have named received millions ■of dollars from your Treasury for transporting your “property and troops,” and are still annually receiving large sums and will for all time. But, as I have shown you, we have the clear and unquestionable right to fix the rate at which these land-grant roads shall transport our mails. Is not 50 per cent, -of the amount you pay to railroad companies which built their own railroads a reasonable •compensation to be paid by the Government to corporations whose railroads were virtually built by the Government? I think it is, -and more than reasonable. There are other grants which I have not Included in either of the foregoing tables, where not a spadeful of earth has been dug in the construction of a railroad, yet the lands are withdrawn from settlement and claimed by the corporations, although the grants were long since forfeited. The forfeiture of these grants will of course be declared. Of all of these grants over 109,000,000 acres, including over 16,000,000 this House has already declared forfeited, are beyond any reasonable question forfeited, and the declaration of that forfeiture by Congress is demanded by the highest consideration of public policy, common honesty, and justice to the people. Even to the extent these landgrant railroads enumerated in the first table were completed, you paid them, as I have •shown, last year $1,144,82?; 91 for transporting ycur mails. This bill would as to these roads, to the extent they are entitled to the lands granted and including the Pacific systems, save to the Treasury annually, I think, near a million of dollars, perhaps more; but the restoration of the forfeited grants to the public domain is of far greater moment than •any such monetary consideration; so that ' this bill cautiously declares that none of its provisions “ shall be construed to waive or Impair any right now existing in favor of the United States.” While these corporations generally withhold the obtaining of patents for their lands to avoid local taxation, and are in the main holding their lands until the Government lands shall beexhausted,they still had taken out patents, up to June 30,1882, fpr 47,745,941 acres. If in the adjustment of these vast grants they obtain over 70,000,090 more it will be because incorporated wealth is stronger in controlling bur affairs than the sense of justice and public duty which controls this Government in maintaining the rights of its people. So patents have already issued up to June 30, 1882, date of last specific report, for 47,745,941 acres, a territory in the aggregate as large as the two great States of Indiana and Ohio combined and nearly a half a million acres more. And this is already done. In ’the last admirable report of the Commissioner ot Public lands we are told that during the last year “twelve railroad patents, covering 124 pages of record, were issued.” Yes, sir; and instead of these vast fields being covered with cheerful homes and a great multitude of prosperous and inpendent citizens, a handful of men became the proprietors of landed estates dwarfing the baronial possessions of Europe. Have the gentlemen who defend this policy considered how surely under this policy, if its development shall be completed, thq old-time republican simplicity of our institutions will gve place to a splendid government controlled and supported by corporate power and concentrated wealth? But the fact must now be-apparent that no demands which the Government could make on these corporations for ti e free transportation of the mails, property, and troops, now and lor al) time, could compensate this Government and its people for the lands It has granted. The legislator who considers the mere monetary value of the land granted, enormous as it is, takes a very superficial view or the subject. Had the value of these vast millions of acres been granted in money from the public Treasury or expressed in bonds issued by the Government payable in money, the only evil to our free institutions .vould have teen the granting of great fortunes by the special favoritism of Government to a portion of its people at the expense of their fellow citizens. (All monarchies present examples of this policy.) The evil, great as it might be, would not go beyond this, and an honest and earnest vigilance of the people would and could in the progress of time correct It. But the giving away in vast tracts to the favorites of Congress of the fertile lands which, on any just conception of our free institutions, ought to be the freeholds of our people, advancing the price of these lands beyond the reach of the laboring and landless mon of the present period and early future, is an evil that admits of no remedy except revolution. To make these grants on the pretense of progress and opening up the wilderness to the developing power of labor, to give labor a chance, is to Invite to our shores the theory of the Middle Ages, baronial estates, baron and serf, the power of the one to shelter the feebleness of the other) Was it through imperial grants the great country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Allegheny range was settled, and thence onward to the Mississippi, with a prosperous

people, remarkable for the rugged virtues of their manhood, but still more remarkable (and without a precedent In history) for the general equality in their material possessions? Here was seen the natural outgrowth of our free institutions. Is the new theory of progress through baronial grants producing such fruits? But the evils of this system are not limited to the withdrawal for all time Irom the great body of our laboring and landless people of more than 200,900,090 acres of public lands (a territory in the aggregate equaling in extent ten such States as Indiana); nor in creating corporations so great and powerful that they pervade every department of your Government, tampering with official authority and claiming the benefit of every doubt, putting the Government itself at defiance; nor in the creation of overgrown fortunes, which enter the controlling departments of your Government through States organized under the auspices of these corporations and exercise judicial, executive, and legislative power. No, sir; the evil does not terminate there, but under this perfidious system of progess, as an inevitable and natural result, land monopoly runs riot, the land jobbers hold high carnival, and the lands left after taking out the great grants, the lands left under this treacherous system for the people, are seized upon by the vigilant land-jobbing capitalist and his skillful and unscrupulous agents. Your land-grant roads everywhere meander through your most fertile lands, on the margin of rivers and through fruitful valleys, and eve n before the laboring men, your landless people, the men who long to became, with their wives and children, bona fide settlers of the new country, are able to turn their faces westward the remaining lands—every fertile valley, every inviting field, even the alternate sections reserved in the land grants, and far beyond—are taken up section after section, swelling into great private estates; and your pre-emption law, through fraud and perjury, is made to do service in this most infamous proceeding. Opening up the wilderness! For whom? The bona fide settler, whose labor would make the land fruitful, and whose children, reared in virtuous industry, would give strength and stability to their country? No, sir; to the land jobber and the land-holding barons who move so naturally alongside the land-grant corporation. You may travel for hundreds of miles even in Dakota, and, although you see no human habitation, every acre of the land has already ceased to be a part of our once grand public domain; in vast and solitary regions not an acre left for the settler. Under the old-time, honest system of our fathers and of the early period of our age every quarter-section entered would have been adorned by the home of an independent freeholder and the presence of his wife and children. Time will develop the great landed estates your land-grant system has rendered possible, even if that was not its original purpose, and will call down the execration of mankind upon the Infamy. Even now a list of some of them is made public. How does this list become a republic? I clip the following from the San Francisco Daily Examiner, a leading journal on the Pacific coast:

THE GROWING MONSTER. Besides the millions of acres belonging to railroad and other corporations, the amount of land that is being acquired by forign capitalists and landlords is fairly amazing. Ireland is to-day groaning beneath the yoke of oppression, and not many years will roll around before the American tenant, upon his knees, will also look up into the scowling face of his master and acknowledge his obedience. Following are a ’few of America's foreign landlords, and the amount of their holdings expressed in acres: The Holland Land Company, New • • Mexico 4,500/00 An English syndicate, No. 3,in Texas.. 3,000,000 Sir Edward Reid and a syndicate, in Florida 2,000,000 English syndicate, in Mississippi 1,800,000 ■Marquis of Tweedale 1,750,000 Phillips, Marshall & Co., London 1,300,000 German syndicate 1,100,000 Anglo-American syndicate, Mr. Rogers, President, London 750,000 Byran H. Evans, of London, in Mississippi 500,000 Duke of Sutherland 425,000 British Land Company, in Kansas.... 320,000 Wm. Whalley, M. P., Peterboro, England 310,000 Missouri Land Company, Edinburgh, Scotland 300,000 Robert Tennant, of London 230,000 Dundee Land Company, Scotland 247,000 Lord Dunmore 120,000 Benjamin Newgas, Liverpool 100,000 Lord Houghton, in Florida 60,000 Lord Dunraven, in Colorado 60,090 English Land Company, in Florida..... 50,000 England Land Company, in Arkansas. 50,000 Albert Peel, M. P., Leicestershire, England. 10,000 Sr J. L. Kay, Yorkshire, England 5,000 Alexander Grant, of London, in Kansas 35,000 English syndicate (represented by Close Bros.) Wisconsin 110,000 M. Ellerhauser, of Halifax,’ Nova Scotia, in West Virginia 600,000 A Scotch syndicate, in Florida 500,000 A. Boysen, Danish Consul, in Milwaukee 50,000 Missouri Land Company, of Edinburgh, Scotland 165,000 T0ta1...20,747,000

Twenty million seven hundred and fortyseven thousand acres! And the land-grant system was to enable the bona fide settler to reach the public land! 1 admit the railroad land grants are not respons.ble for two of the purchases set forth in the above list, but, omitting those, here is a territory which in the aggregate is nearly as large as the great State of Indiana, held by foreign corporations, lords, and capitalists, every • acre of which, the two tracts omitted, I am assured, is within the land-grant regions, and entered unquestionably through the aid of that infamous system. I have before me a list of land purchases by thirty American capitalists in the land-grant sections, ranging from 25,000 to 2,000,000 acres, aggregating 7,427,000 acres. For what purpose did the Northern Pacific corporation invite the nobility of Europe to the recent festivities attending the pretended completion of that railroad except to invite attention to the princely possessions it could place within their reach? But why enter into detail? Did any member of Senate or House who supported those grants, making grant after grant until they permeated every fertile region of the public domain, and until the public voice changed the political sentiment of this .House, except any other result? Thus, sir, a magnificent public possession, the grandest on the face of the globe, which, under the statemanship of any of the great political parties which controlled the destinies of this republic prior to 1861, would have furnished a safe retreat and shelter for labor, happy and prosperous homes for independent freemen lor generations to come, has been turned over to an accursed monopoly within so brief a period as twenty-two years. The homestead law, the wisest and most humane act of legislation since Moses pronounced the law that nourished into manhood the most masculine fragment of the human race: “Ye shall divide the land by lot for an inheritance among your families; to the more ye shall give the more inheritance, and to the fewer ye shall give the less inheritance.” The homestead law! What a mockery of human hopes! Before the hour for its real triumph had come Congress, in the recklessness of absolute power, .yielding to the sordid motive of coining the common wealth of the people into private fortunes, had granted to monopoly the wealth in homes and human hanpiness the homestead law was intended to diffuse. The Indian reservations and forfeited grants are about all that is left. Do gentlemen who defend this land-grant railroad system and complain so bitterly that we are seeking to impose unjust burdens bn the men who have obtained the benefit of these grants forget, in estimating the value of those grants, that in a government like ours homes and intelligence are not only necessary to the well-being of the whole people, but ihdispensable to the peace and order es society and the stability of government? Do they think that a system can be inaugurated by Congress by which a few skillful and ingenious gentlemen may monopolize imperial wealth out of the common inheritance of the people and open up opportunity by which the greater portion of tbe lands of the republic adapted to agriculture and the blessings of homes and of independent freeholds can and will, with absolute certainty, be seized upon by foreign and domestic capitalists, and the price thus advanced beyond the reach of the greater portion of our people, without inflicting a deadly wound on our free institutions and the rights of laboring men? Does any intelligent man believe that our system of government can be maintained without the great body of our people beln*

independent freeholders? And yet this landgrant railroad system, by its own direct monopoly of the public lands and by the opportunities it has opened up for capitalists and corporations, European as well as American, to monopolize them, has even now almost exhausted that portion of the public domain adapted to agriculture, rendering it absolutely certain that .throughout a vast region the plow will not be “in the hand ot its owner,” but landlord and tenant, great estates and squalid poverty, will curse the land. Nothing but forces and currents now hid from our view can prevent this. So the rigid parsimony of our fathers in hoardingup these public lands for their posterity becomes the dishonor of their chiloren; for it must be remembered that up to 1862, when this fatal and venal system was entered upon, the entire grants for internal improvements from the 17th day of September, 1787, to the 4th of March, 1861, made exclusively to States, not an acre to corporations, was but 31,600,846 acres, including the grant to the Illinois Central, so often mentioned, of three and one-quarter millions of acres—large for that period; how trivial for the period from 1861 to 18751 With the public land exhausted, disposed of in immense grants, or at nominal prices to foreign and domestic capitalists, then, and not till then, the period of peril to this republic will begin. Have gentlemen considered the extraordinary, yet silent, influence these unshorn, fertile, and virgin lands have exercised through all the years of our history over our people? They have been, from the beginning, not only the cause and the source of prosperity, but, more than that, the cause of the unexampled internal and domestic quietude and repose we have enjoyed, under the shelter of which our greatness has been achived. Where in all the world’s history have a people through more than a century been so greatly exempt (only excepting the inheritance of African slavery) from internal strife? How seldom througn all these years, though prolonged periods of commercial and industrial depression have often occurred, has labor, even in limited fields and for a brief period, like a swarthy giant in despair, girded up its loins for a struggle against oppression. Yet at times a loud cry for bread has been heard m our cities, and no overmastering army has stood ready to strike. Ido not assert that the absence of disorder and unrest, which in other nations has organized standing armies and navies, is with us to be attributed exclusively to the existence of our public domain and the hope and confidence it inspired, for other great causes have contributed to that end; but I do assert that in the greatest degree the internal peace, order, and well-being of our people can and must ba traced to this great common wealth of lands, which from thp beginning has arrested the attention, animated the courage, and inspired the hope of the laboring men of this country. Cheap lands, the hope of home and fireside, and independent manhood have been our standing army and watchful navy, guarding for more than a century the repose and order of the American people. For generations the towns and cities and mining regions east of the Alleghenies, and in more recent years westward of that ancient landmark,. have swarmed with workmen in the countless industries of the forge, the loom, the mine, and the workshop; the overcrowded rural population have swarmed into your towns and cities; everywhere thousands upon thousands of industrious and strong men have been barely able to keep the wolf from the door. Have gentlemen considered the humane and hope-inspiring Influence of the great public domain on the lives of this great and ever-growing multitude of our people? Follow the weary workman into his rented and cheerless tenement, furnished with the bare necessities* of life; see him as he sits moodily at the fireside with his pocrly clad and scantily fed wife and children around him—how dreary and cheerless 1 But in the midst of his hopeless despondency let the old hope revive, hear him talk of the oft-consid-ered plans, by saving and scrimping year after year (cheese-paring, if you please, even on the bare necessities of life), to raise means necessary to emigrate to the free fields of the West; and see how poverty and wretchedness vanish and hope revives, while visions of a blessed homestead, with its cheerful fireside, an honest and manly freehold, With green fields and lowing herds, and, above all, happy and hopeful children and prosperous ard peaceful old age, give new courage to the man and bring a gleam of gladness to the weary heart of the careworn wife. Who shall say how many millions of laboring men, buoyed up by the hope your grand public domain inspired, have thus, through the patient savings of years, gone westward, and as independent and prosperous freeholders aided in developing that widespread field of human happiness stretching westward from the Alleghenies, where the public domain began; or how many more have toiled on, inspired at least by the blessed promises of hope? Yes, sir, far beyond the hopes ever realized, your public domain has been a source of energy, industry, and peace. *

The blighting curse of land monopoly is the outgrowth of your legislation of the Jast twenty-two years; the grants began under the new system in 1862 and terminated in 1875. The States formed and settled within the public domain prior to that time are and have been from the beginning alike remarkable for their prosperity and the diffusion of their landed wealth; those formed and forming under your legislation of the last twenty-two years are smitten with the deadly blight of the old world, the curse of the middle age—land monopoly—the hope of labor blasted by its overshadowing and baneful power, while wealth stalks into the council chambers of the Government at its own volition, and manhood, as in the old world, stands silent and abashed! But gentlemen say the country permeated by these grants is prosperous, marvelous in its prosperity; but have they considered that the wealth which is now being developed with such startling rapidity under these grants is the wealth of the few? That these great private fortunes not only in bonds and stocks, but in the more precious wealth «f land far more precious than money or bonds or stocks to the people and to this republic —these vast estates greater than have ever before been formed in the same period of time in the history of mankind, belong to monarchy but are the harbingers es woe and death to free institutions? . Do not tbe gentlemen know that this vast wealth which attends the apparent prosperity of this period is not the wealth that gives greatness and strength to a republic, but the wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations of free governfhent, and. wrings from the heart of labor the cry of despair? With the public lands exhausted, with the remnants of the Indian tribes despoiled of their reservations, and tbe lands seized upon by capitalists and merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands everywhere advancedin price beyond the reach of laboring men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully conscious of the wrong you have done thorn by your legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for as of old? lam not astonished that gentlemen deem tnis early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great navy; it wiU come, if it does come, in the natural order before a great army. Capital is timid and full of suggestions; the navy is the most remote, but 1 am not surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that your army is too small. These, too, may be some of the bitter fruits of your Imperial grants. I fear that it will be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will *be no more. Gentlemen should not foiget that the wrong that has been done to laboring men and their children by giving over their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in due time be considered by the most intelligent body of laboring men who ever debated a public wrong—men fully aware of their rights and capable of asserting them. I have been unintentionally led into this discussion of the results oi the land-grant railroad policy by the assumption of gentlemen that that policy was wise and beneficent, and that tbe Government should treat with kindly consideration the corporations which have obtained the benefit of these grants; but I know of no subject which so imperatively demands tbe earnest consideration of ingress; and this House has I think most

wisely given this great question of tl.» public lands and forfeited grants a commanding position. For myself, I demand in the name of every laboring man in America that these corporations whose railroads were built and equipped by your bounty shall bear public burdens on the basis of the benefits you have so lavishly bestowed on them. These corporations to the extent they fulfilled the terms of the grants will hold them until our population and the labor of our millions of laboring men in every field of human industry shall have enhanced their value. To this extent there is no remedy for the evil done. But common justice to the whole people and the highest public policy demand that to the extent that default has been made by the land-grant corporations the forfeiture should be sternly declared and the lands restored to the public domain. I inpulge the confident hope and belief that betore this Congress shall adjourn this House at least will have declared the forfeiture and restoration of over 100,000,090 acres of these grants to the people; and with every acre ot the public land adapted to any form of agriculture placed under the safeguard of the homestead law alone, all that remains of our once great inheritance is at least secure. I cannot doubt that the people with one voice will command that It shall be done. But, Mr. Chairman, no remedy can be complete. The evils done to our free institutions by the legislation of Congress from 1862 to 1875 will survive the memory of the men who passed the laws as well as of those who at every step resisted their enactment. A great monopoly of land admits of no remedy; it is a crime against the human race and deserves the execration of mankind. No time can palliate the wrong. No,«ir; when the time ehall come to consider and write the history of these grants and the measures of public policy you have gathered around them, when the fruits of that legislation shall have ripened in all its bitterness, the phfioeophical historian will pause with astonishment at this robbery of the common inheritance of our people. How could it happen that, after the public lands had been guarded against monopoly lor near a century with sleepless vigilance for homes of successive generations, shoring up free institutions by the freehold of the citizen, al party which in its first advent into power! was capable of enacting so wi. e a measure as the homestead law should go back on alii the traditions of the Government and within, fifteen years after its advent into power turn' over to soulless .monopoly and heartless' speculation the grand inheritance of the people? Of course there has been and will' be a marvelous development of resources, towns, and cities; but out of it all there rises up a deadly presence in a republicprivate estates greater than any kingin the plentltude of power ever conferred on a favorite; wealth and perpetual franchises, arrogant and exacting, cautious and timid, intrenched as in a citadel in every department of your Government, and silently controlling every avenue of power; while in the near future—how humiliating the thought!—millions of our people with their wives and children homeless and miserable, who but for these imperial estates wou'd have been independent freeho’ders with prosperous and happy homes adding to the stability and true glory of their country. The legislation that fosters the wealth of the few and facilitates the growth ot private fortunes out <sf the common wealth of the republic is a harbinger of dishonor and decay to free institutions; that which firmly upholds the equal rights of all men to protection and justice, and leaves all else to the enterprise and industry of the people, diffuses wealth and elevates all silently and surely as the dews of heaven fall upon and refresh the earth. The one appeals sooner! or later to the arbiter of power for support; the other, to the heart of the human race. Free institutions cannot survive for a century the theory of government in its complete development which rendered these extraordinary grants of the public lands to favored citizens possible. The words I have more than once quoted on this floor, uttered by Saint Pierre, the humane philosopher of France, as he stood on the verge of the first great revolution of his country and beheld with aching heart the miseries of its people, are true: “Great estates destroy the spirit of patriotism in those who have everything and those who have nothing.” *