Land absentee

“ What more absurd disposition of our timber land could have been made than the laws under which it has passed to private hands? The Homestead and Preemption acts, framed for prairies, requiring the settler to live on and cultivate the soil, have been extended to our forests, and to comply with their terms, thousands of men have withdrawn from vocations by which they were increasing the wealth of the Nation, and with blankets and provisions strapped on their backs and axe and compass in hand have worked their weary way through the pathless forests to vacant Government lands, on which they filed. ”

“ Settlement is still but a fringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals and corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyond the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and pack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler. ”

“ Valley and in other comparable places; the exploiting and promoting occupancy of those lands is passing and a stable progressive development appears. We have been obsessed of the passion to cover everything at once, to skin the earth, to pass on, even when there was no necessity for so doing. It is a vast pity that this should ever have been the policy of government in giving away great tracts of land by lottery, as if our fingers would burn if we held the lands inviolate until needed by the natural process of settlement. ”

“ To revert to the parallel of the disposition of land made by the owner of an estate, who certainly would not place his kitchen - garden in the loveliest part of his park, do not let the Nation surrender forest or hillside, but, preserving them intact, apportion for purposes of cultivation the less beautiful, flatter, and probably more productive ground. Let the public watch how many of the schemes brought forward relate to regulation, not inclosure. ”

“ Far from being discouraged by the fact of so much surveyed public land remaining unsold, we should rejoice that this bountiful resource, possessed by our country, remains in almost undiminished quantity, notwithstanding so many new and flourishing states have sprung up in the wilderness, and so many thousands of families have been accommodated. It might be otherwise, if the public land was dealt out by government with a sparing, grudging, griping hand. ”

“ The reclamation of the unsettled arid public lands presents a different problem. Here it is not enough to regulate the flow of streams. The object of the Government is to dispose of the land to settlers who will build homes upon it. ”

“ I think it is. Construing together the granting words and those respecting the lieu land selection, it is evident that one of the 'other claims or rights' excepting land from the operation of the grant was 'occupation [occupied] by homestead settlers.' The word 'occupied' and the idea conveyed by it were foreign to the homestead law at date of this act, as an essential element in the reservation of land. ”

“ My land was paid for, such as it was; but when the people who, like me, had drailed out across the prairies with the last year's rush, came and asked me to join the Settlers' Club to run these intruders off, it appeared to me that it was only a man's part in me to stand to it and take hold and do. I felt the old urge of all landowners to stand together against the landless, I suppose. What is title to land anyhow, but the right of those who have it to hold on to it? No man ever made land--except my ancestors, the Dutch, perhaps. ”

“ But now the prairies are skinned by rich men, by "land-grabbers," people who buy up tracts of twenty thousand or thirty thousand acres wherever they can lay their hands upon them, evading the law and filling the western world with roving labourers who work on these prodigious farms in summer and starve in winter. ”

“ But in the mean time, the inhabitants are subjected to the greatest inconvenience, nay, to the most serious injury, from the state of property in land. The absent proprietors neither improve the land, nor will let others improve it. They retain the land, and keep it in a state of wilderness. ”

“ Several millions of acres of unoccupied land belonging in a sense to the people of this country are to be kept untilled in defiance of the plainest policy that nature and God have indicated to us, namely, that labor should come in contact with land! For want of this conjunction our colonies are to be checked, while at home miserable millions are gaping for work and food. ”

“ At present, our whole land system is constructed to prevent their working. It is Nature's way alternately to gather together and to disperse abroad Our land laws are all on the side of gathering together. ”

“ This untenanted hem of territory surrounding so many savage and barbarous peoples reflects their superficial and unsystematic utilization of their soil, by reason of which the importance of the land itself and the proportion of population to area are greatly reduced. It is a part of that uneconomic and extravagant use of the land, that appropriation of wide territories by small tribal groups, which characterizes the lower stages of civilization, as opposed to the exploitation of every square foot for the support of a teeming humanity, which marks the most advanced states. ”

“ It seems to me that the tenant-farmers have been out of sight altogether. Now they have waked up, and there is no power to put them to sleep again. I am more than astonished to find not one intelligent person to defend the Land laws. ”

“ It stated that the reasons for the existing depression were the reserves of land for the crown and clergy, "which must for a long time keep the country a wilderness, a harbour for wolves, and a hindrance to compact and good neighbourhood; defects in the system of colonisation; too great a quantity of lands in the hands of individuals who do not reside in the province, and are not assessed for their property." ”

“ So far has the divorcement of the worker from the soil proceeded, that the farming districts, the civilized world over, are dependent upon the cities for the gathering of the harvests. Then it is, when the land is spilling its ripe wealth to waste, that the street folk, who have been driven away from the soil, are called back to it again. ”

“ So injurious is the existence of this quantity of wild land, in the midst or in the neighbourhood of settlement, that numerous cases have occurred in which a settler, after several years' residence upon his property, and having expended, in money and labour, from £.20 to £.50 in clearing part of it and building his house, has been driven to abandon the farm, and to sell it for one-third or even one-fourth of the sum that he had expended upon it. I have myself bought farms which have been abandoned in this way for the merest trifle. ”

“ As the product of mere fancy, such sweeping soldiers' settlement projects were bound to die a natural death. And yet they have not been without value. They created lively discussion, and called attention to our land problems, especially to the reclamation and colonization of unused lands by the people who want land and are fit to be farmers and to do hard land-pioneering work, be they returned soldiers, native farmers, or newly arrived immigrants. ”

“ Land monopoly—in the hands of individuals, corporations or syndicates—is at bottom the prime cause of the inequalities which obtain; which desolate fertile acres turned over to vast ranches and into bonanza farms of a thousand acres, where not one family finds a habitation, where muscle and brain are supplanted by machinery, and the small farmer is swallowed up and turned into a tenant or slave. ”

“ Those who have 40 acres of land, we are willing, shall remain until they can dispose of it without loss if it should require years. But we urge, most strongly urge, that emigration cease, and cease immediately, as nothing else can or will allay for a moment, the deep excitement that is now unhap [p] ily agitating this community. ”

“ They could never cultivate the land. You know a vast deal. You don't pay more than half the rent that was paid by the former tenant.
How many bighas of land was this farm, Sir?
You pretend not to know how many bighas your land is. What! do you pay rent without knowing that?
I have heard, that all the former land does not now belong to it.
Where did you hear, that formerly there was a quantity of land which is not now in the farm?
I have heard, Sir, that a bruhmutra was given out of this land, and that the river has carried some away.
When was land given to brahmuns out of that farm? ”

“ Then, too, if it should become bruited abroad, while the valley was open for entry, that water for irrigation was being developed up the valley, settlers could have flocked in down the valley—and waited for the water. A nester is patient. His life is spent in waiting. Under the desert land laws one can file on three hundred and twenty acres, or a half-section, pay twenty-five cents per acre down and then wait four years before being compelled to file with the land office the proof of reclamation that will entitle him to final patent to his land. ”

“ If you refuse to pay unjust rents, if you refuse to take farms from which others have been evicted, the Land Question must be settled, and settled in a way that will be satisfactory to you. It depends, therefore, upon yourselves, and not upon any Commission or any Government. ”

“ The first agrarian statutes were of a characteristically restrictive nature, and no constructive policy was attempted by the government until after a century of futile attempts to deal with the separate evils of engrossing, enclosure, conversion to pasture, destruction of houses and rural depopulation. The first remedy these evils suggested was limitation of the amount of land which one man should be allowed to hold. ”

“ If land had even been systematically treated as capable of acquiring rights, the time of a disseisee might have been added to that Of the wrongful occupant, on the ground that the land, and not this or that individual, was gaining the easement, and that long association between the enjoyment of the privilege and the land was sufficient, which has never been the law. ”

“ A good deal of the land, distant from villages, lies waste, though capable of good tillage; and from the all pervading cause, the want of confidence in the Government and its officers, and of any feeling of security to life, property, and industry. Should this cause be removed, the whole surface of the country would become the beautiful garden which the parts well cultivated and peopled now are. ”

“ The Government were compelled to face the problem and attempted to give former settlers a fresh chance and gradually to accustom artisans to rural pursuits which, in the case of uncleared land, are at first of a simple character. But the facilities offered under the Land Act were of little use unless it could be arranged that the men, being without capital, should have outside employment upon which they could depend until their lands had been cleared and brought into cultivation. ”

“ During this session of Congress the policy of Military Land Bounties was very earnestly agitated, and threatened the most alarming consequences. Probably no great question has been so imperfectly understood by our public men as the land question, and the truth of this is attested by the multiplied schemes of pillage and plunder to which the public domain has been exposed within the past thirty or forty years. Among these the project of Land Bounties to soldiers has been conspicuous. ”

“ The land law system which was designed to meet the needs of the fertile and well-watered regions of the Middle West has largely broken down when applied to the dryer regions of the Great Plains, the mountains, and much of the Pacific slope, where a farm of 160 acres is inadequate for self-support. ”

“ When they had protected themselves from prospective settlers, it would be safe for them to develop their water away up the valley. When they were ready, it would be easy enough, to suddenly discover that a desert valley had, by some stupid error, been included in a Forest Reserve, the boundaries would be readjusted immediately, the valley once more thrown open for entry and—dummy entrymen, Johnny-on-the-spot, to file on the land for the water company! ”

“ The public land which he may take under the Homestead law lies a full day's journey beyond the border settlements, to which he must look for Mills, Stores, Schools, and even Highways. If he persists in squatting, with intent to earn his quarter-section by settlement and cultivation, he must take a long day's journey across unbridged streams and sloughs, over unmade roads, to find boards, or brick, or meal, or glass, or groceries ”

“ This is a sure-enough-always-no-man's-land, a jumping-off place for all the earth—too high for irrigation farming, too arid for any other kind of farming, and so an unclaimed land. In the twenty-mile drive, you will see, perhaps, three homesteaders' shanties, where settlers have fenced off a square and tried ranching; but water is too deep for boring. Horses turned outside the square join the wild bands and are lost ”

“ That object cannot be achieved unless such of the public lands as are suitable for settlement are conserved for the actual home-maker. Such lands should pass from the possession of the Government directly and only into the hands of the settler who lives on the land. ”

“ Heretofore the trouble has been that we have been unable to get land where there was any assurance that we could have it again the second year, and that the limited amount of land makes it impossible to give the men as much as they ought to have. ”