Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 29, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 August 1885 — Tuarning the Rascals Out. [ARTICLE]

Tuarning the Rascals Out.

Chicago Times: The executive decree ordering the removal of all private inclosures of public lands, has been anticipated. It is the second step in the execution of the policy that proposes for its end the abatement of all usurpations, seizures, monopolies, and unlawful intrusions of whatever character upon the available remainder of the public lands. The history of the administra tion of the public domain during last quarter of a century is an almost continuous account of scandalous artifices to appropriate that common estate of the people to the purposes of speculative projectors without rendering adequate compensation. The wretched policy of subsidizing railway piojectors with immense land grants was the first and, for many reasons, the most reprehensible part of the colossal programme of spoliation.— In a period of ten years it transferred from the agency of the American people to hardly more than a dozen commercial corporations an area of land greater than the original northwest territory, now subdivided into the six politicaff|comnartments: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. Of course the favored speculators took pains to appropriate the best lands, leaving only deserts, mountains, lava-beds, and verdureless plains to be appropriated in the normal way by “actual settlers.” The nat ..ral consequence ot that wretched policy was the quick disappearance of all the great districts of valuable land, s ich as the industrious pioneers of civilization found beyond the great lakes forty years ago, and the reduction of the public domain to lands of an inferior quality, or such as were practically worthless for the purposes of agricultural industry.

Following the land-grabbing corporations called railway companies came other companies of land speculators that, by modes of clrcanery and fraud, not inf equently aided by dishonest functionaries of the government appropriated whatever productive lands the preceding land jobbers did not take. To-day, nay, even ten or more years ago, the hardy home-seeker might travel from the Mississippi to the summit of the great mountain cordillera, and traverse the numerous fertile valleys of rhat mighty upheaval, without discovering a quarter section of first-rate land that has not been seized by some syndicate of speculators. Among the most aggressive, grasping, and lawless of such speculators have been the great cattle companies. Finding that the arid plains and semi-barren foothills would subsist herds of cattle wherever they could have access to water, the cattle barons proceeded in the first place to monopolize the streams by one or another form or pretense of title to limit ’d tracts upon their margins. Cut off from water, the lands behind were made unavailable for any use whatever. First “cornering” the water supply, the cattle barons proceeded, with deliberation and without any color or pretense of title, to inclose with barbed-wire fences as many square miles of public land as thev wished to occupy. The extent to which this lawless appropriation of the

public domain has been pushed is ’ndicated by the fact that a single cattle compan have inclosed upward of 1,000,000 acres of public land in Colorado, and twelve other companies from 30,000 to 200,000 acres each in the same territory, besides many smaller inclosures by less opulent companies. In Kansas, Nebraska, Dacota, Montana, Wyoming, New Mexico, and other regions are found like extensive inclosures of public land by men that have no color of lawful right to inclose a foot of that land. Indeed, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that so much of the public domain as government has not unwisely given away to railway projectors or been appropriated by speculative land companies with “influences at court,” has been fenced in by cattle barons that have stretched an almost continuous barb-wire railing across the republic from the Rio Bravo to the Pembina mountains. And after taking possession of the unappropriated public domain, they invaded the Indian Territory and took possession of that, too. * In February last, congress passed an act declaring the fact that all such inclosures of the public domain are unlawful, and authorizing the president* to “take such means as may be necessary to remove and destroy” such inclosures. The cattle barons were thus warned of the “wrath to come;” but, like their depredating peers in the Indian country, they proceeded exactly as if they b lieved the government would accommodate them by abstaining from executing the law. The president’s decree ordering an immediate removal of their inclosures is notice of the contrary. It is the policy of the actual government to reclaim from the possession of usurpers, intruders, and speculators the remnant of the public domain and hold it for the purposes of actual settlement. It is the policy of right and of equity. It is the policy that government ought to have steadily pursued, and probably would not have departed from if the spirit of monopoly and wild speculation had not invaded and gained control of the highest regions of the administration. The foremost representative of that spirit in all the land was James G. Blaine. The land-grabbers, the railway speculators, the whole tribe of subsidy beggars, the baronial invaders of the Indian Territory and the cattle barons that seized the public domain, as well as the smaller tribes of schemers with whom the “magnetic statesman” stood in friendly relations “on the ground floor,” can refer their discomfiture to their failure to place him at the head of the state.