Land grabbing

“ The land is ploughed, and the seed sown, often by stealth at night, in the immediate vicinity of a sanguinary contest between the Government officers and the landholders. It is only when the latter are defeated, and take to the jungles, or the Honourable Company's districts, and commence their indiscriminate plunder, that the cultivator ceases from his labours, and the lands are left waste. ”

“ Now, if we suppose the destruction of land to proceed unchecked, it is manifest that at some period, however remote, the formation of shoals and banks must come to an end, owing to the continual diminution of the land from the demolition of which they derive their substance. ”

“ One phase of national security is contingent upon the effectiveness with which these practices are applied by all who work with farm, range, and forest resources. The record will prove that nearly 300,000,000 acres of land have been practically destroyed by erosion in the United States. Twice that acreage is rapidly deteriorating under the same forces.
Remember, that it was only a century ago when Americans received their first rudimentary lessons in exercising a little common sense in the exploitation of resources, whether for crops, lumber, mineral, livestock, or recreational opportunities. ”

“ Some of the finest tracts of land have been forsaken, and given up to the untamed beasts of the jungle. The motives to industry have been destroyed. The soil seems to lie under a curse. Instead of yielding abundance for the wants of its own population, and the inhabitants of other regions, it does not keep in existence its own children. It becomes the burying-place of millions, who die upon its bosom crying for bread. ”

“ They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy countrymen turn the best inhabited places in solitudes; for when an insatiable wretch, who is a plague to his country, resolves to inclose many thousand acres of ground, the owners, as well as tenants, are turned out of their possessions, by tricks, or by main force, or being wearied out with ill usage, they are forced to sell them. ”

“ Now that the land-mania has subsided, and a contrary reaction has taken place, the most fertile tracts of ground, whether improved, or in a state of nature, are quite unsaleable at any price, and many beautiful, well-cultivated farms have been sold by execution at frightful sacrifices. ”

“ I believe they have no fences, except, sometimes, around their richest gardens,--and these not so much for a defence against the encroachment of beasts, as they are for a protection from thieves and robbers. Very little of their land is left uncultivated. Indeed some of the most rich and beautiful grounds are made so by human industry. Sometimes by embankments built up like mildams, the water is kept back, and acres and acres are made dry land, and rich harvests are gathered, where before it was all covered with water, and men used to drag their nets to catch fish. ”

“ These old surveys, taken from the pick of the land, were already nearly all occupied by unsuspecting and peaceful settlers, and thus their titles were demolished, and the choice was placed before them either to buy their land over at a double price or to vacate it, with their families and personal belongings, immediately. Land locators sprang up by hundreds. The country was held up and searched for “vacancies” at the point of a compass. Hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of splendid acres were wrested from their innocent purchasers and holders. ”

“ But now that two boys, without experience, take up a claim and, by irrigating, produce crops far and away ahead of any in the region, the others realize their mistake. It isn’t fair, but it’s true. You, as land agent, are the only person who can handle the situation, and you’ve got to hurry!” As though to emphasize the fire lookout’s words, two horsemen drew rein in front of the Land Office, dismounted, and entered. ”

“ Hence year by year the land becomes ever more treeless, barren, and naked; whole hill-ranges which only twenty years ago were densely clad with thickets of varied growth, the lair of boar and roe, are now denuded and disfigured. The blackened circle, the site of a charcoal-furnace, attests the destructive handiwork of man. If one expostulates with the carboneros, or laments the destruction wrought, their reply is always the same:—"The land will now become tierra de pan," or corn-land, of which there is already more than enough for the labour available. ”

“ The danger is now that this reckless tillage, in a way justified of old, may be continued and become habitual with our people. It is, indeed, already a fixed habit in many parts of the country, particularly in the South, where a small farmer expects to wear out two or three plantations in the course of his natural life. Many of them manage to ruin from one to two hundred acres of land in the course of half a century of uninterrupted labour. ”

“ Out in one of the western states or territories a reservation might be made of several thousand acres of land, around the rim of which the convicts could be made to build a great wall shutting themselves away from the rest of the world. On its surface would be built in the same way habitations for them, and they would live there, tilling the soil and manufacturing their necessities, until death. ”

“ Every exile who is not considered bad enough for the mines—those black abysses, at whose entrance, as at that of Dante’s hell, all hope must be left behind—receives a piece of land, a hut, a horse, two cows, the necessary agricultural implements, and provisions for a year. ”

“ I'd buy the land from here if I were sure of being able to get the hands to clear it this season. They are old rice lands, no doubt laid out in the days of the buccaneers. One marvels how they did it; cleared acres and acres of the most hopeless tangle of swampy forest, built dikes that look like old fortifications, and all they had to do it with were slave labor and a black-snake whip!"
"Poor devils!" said Giles. ”

“ Suppose you were a fellow like I am—a prospector—and was digging around the record-books, looking up land titles, mineral grants, and so forth, and got on to a trail that you followed up and found that a new city had been laid out and lots sold off and buildings going up, and all that—all on a location that wasn’t legal? Mind you, I ain’t naming any place. But it’s on a section that land-grabbers got hold of a long time ago. And they were such hungry land-grabbers that they stretched lines to take in everything that was loose around those parts. There was no one to make any holler about it. ”

“ Then they tax themselves, and hire engineers and contractors to dig a huge system of ditches, and to build levees and dikes, to guard their fields against high water. You see, an Illinois farmer may own a thousand acres of the richest alluvial land. But if half that land is swamp, and the other half lies so low that the creeks near by may overflow and ruin his crops any day, then his thousand mellow acres aren't much more use than ten acres of hard-scrabble here in New England. To be sure, he can cut his own ditches, and build his own levee, without consulting his neighbors. ”

“ How disastrously the destruction of the forests of a country affects the regularity of the water supply in its rivers necessary for navigation, increases the frequency of freshets and inundations, dries up springs, and transforms fertile agricultural districts into barren wastes, is a matter of universal experience the world over. It is the highest time that we should turn our earnest attention to this subject, which so seriously concerns our national prosperity.
The government cannot prevent the cutting of timber on land owned by private citizens. ”

“ The fat cornfields were often littered with a varied wreckage which the farmers must soon heap together and burn, to be rid of it, and everywhere were proofs of the river’s power to devastate as well as enrich its shores. The dwellers there had no power against it, in its moments of insensate rage, and the land no protection from its encroachments except in the simple device of the willow hedges, which, if planted, sometimes refused to grow, but often came of themselves and kept the torrent from the loose, unfathomable soil of the banks, otherwise crumbling helplessly into it. ”

“ 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. ”

“ They are pinched for room even in the wilderness, are prevented from choosing the most fertile soils and favourable situations, and are debarred from cultivating that large extent of soil, in proportion to the hands at work, which can alone compensate, in quantity of produce, for the rude nature of husbandry in the wilderness. If, on the other hand, the land is bestowed with careless profusion, great evils of another kind are produced. Large tracts become the property of individuals, who leave their lands unsettled and untouched. Deserts are thus interposed between the industrious settlers ”

“ Agriculture, especially of the Middle West, is affected in all its parts by the exploitation of land. To a traveller from the Eastern States, the selling [Pg 34] and re-selling of farm land, without fertilization or improvement by any of the successive owners, is a source of amazement.
"The new lands opened under the Homestead act of half a century ago were often exploited for temporary profit by soil robbers who were experts of their kind. Owing to such farm management, the yield of the acre in the United States gradually decreased. Very little intensive farming was done." ”

“ But this verge of ruin to the small proprietor who sees his four acres of crops destroyed means simple extinction. So that the amount of land to be of advantage is that amount which the cottager can cultivate without giving his entire time to it; so that, in fact, he may also earn wages. ”

“ 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. ”

“ While land is stable and possibly the most easily preserved of all forms of property, at least a thief cannot carry it away, yet the preservation of land involves great care and risk.
The taking of any crop from any land reduces its fertility. On the virgin, western fertile lands the farmers laughed at the thought that they should ever need to return fertilizers, but it was only a few years until they yearned for the fertility they had extravagantly wasted. Buildings inevitably decay and they may be destroyed by fire or storm. ”

“ This confinement of landed property to one set of hands, and preventing its free circulation through the community, is a most leading article of ill policy; because it is one of the most capital discouragements to all that industry which may be employed on the lasting improvement of the soil, or is any way conversant about land. ”

“ But the days have forever gone when a living can be snatched, so to speak, from the land in any of these ways. The easily gotten stores of the mines and forests are exhausted; the soil over many millions of acres has been robbed of its fertility. ”

“ The temptation to such exploration would be according to the suspected extent of the minerals, and, being thus subject to indiscriminate invasion, the land would be to one having the title poor and valueless, just in proportion to the supposed richness and abundance of its products. ”

“ INDIVIDUAL LAND DEALERS
Except for government land grants and homestead acts, land dealing and colonization in the United States have, up to very recent times, been entirely in private hands. Land is one of the necessities of life; land dealing, consequently, is one of the most important features in social and economic relations. Yet it has been left unregulated, with the result that land dealing is now the most chaotic sort of business, one which has not worked out its own definite methods, rules, and traditions, as banking and other branches of commerce and business have done. ”

“ To my mind, the conservation movement has not sufficiently estimated or emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice, but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement,—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening fertility of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. ”

“ When the timber is cut, naturally the land remains. Either the company must pay taxes on it, sell it, or allow it to revert to the state. It may be very good land, but it is encumbered with old slashing, probably much of it needs drainage, a stubborn second-growth of scrub oak or red willows has already usurped the soil, and above all it is isolated. Far from the cities, far from the railroad, far even from the crossroad's general store, it is further cut off by the necessity of traversing atrocious and—in the wet season—bottomless roads to even the nearest neighbour. ”

“ The city should take a good look at what is happening. By plundering the forests of the southern hemisphere it is not only bringing about a crisis there. It is using up its own supply of trees as well — the trees without which it cannot survive.
Evil Two
The second evil is the plunder of farmland.
In the previous section I wrote that the city was built by destroying the forests, but land which was formerly forested is first and foremost that which can and should be used for farming. The cities are built almost solely on the level, most fertile land. ”