Public land

“ The land for the people, first of all. As clear as daylight was the right of the people to the land: let the State assume possession, and manage it—its mines and minerals, its agriculture, its public grounds and parks—for the benefit of all, not for the profit of a pampered few. ”

“ To secure the widest distribution of public lands in limited quantities among settlers for residence and cultivation, and thus make the greatest number of individual homes, was the primary object of the public-land legislation in the early days of the Republic. ”

“ The conception of land classification as a business policy on the part of the Government as a landed proprietor belongs rather to this day of more intensive development. At present current public-land legislation calls for highest use, and hence official investigation of natural values and possibilities must precede disposition. ”

“ It has been the policy of the Government heretofore to distribute the public land among the people in such quantities as would enable all desiring to engage in agriculture to do so as land-owners, and not as renters. ”

“ These land agencies are, in a thousand ways, busying themselves in the securing of further lands for speculative purposes. The days of wholesale grants having gone by, they are turning their attention to the lands of the individual settler, and under their tutelage clerks, teachers, town men and women, hired laborers, men who do not know wheat from barley or rye from flax, are filing upon the last of the tillable public lands. ”

“ The republic has entered upon a new era, an era in which the monopoly of the land will tell with accelerating effect. The great fact which has been so potent is389 ceasing to be. The public domain is almost gone—a very few years will end its influence, already rapidly failing. I do not mean to say that there will be no public domain. For a long time to come there will be millions of acres of public lands carried on the books of the Land Department. ”

“ Of course you know that if land is allowed to go unfenced for twenty years—or for a longer or shorter period according to different states—that the land becomes public property, or at least the public has a right-of-way over it and it can not be closed off. ”

“ But whether land is developed privately or by public bodies, it is essential, in order to secure real reform, that the needs, domestic and social, of the people for whom the houses are provided should be intimately understood. ”

“ The drawbacks of large properties—The necessity of a better subdivision of the public lands—The division into lots of large tracts of land, in order to encourage colonisation—The system of exploiting property. ”

“ Hearne, 19 How. 252,262. Under the authority of specific appropriations by congress for that purpose, the resurveys of public lands have become an extensive branch of the business of the general land-office. ”

“ There was a domain of public land, which was continually extended by the conquests of neighboring States and the partial confiscations that followed. Although land in the conquered territory was sometimes granted to the poorer citizens, there were large tracts of public lands that were either cultivated or allowed to remain in pasture. ”

“ That the public lands of the United States belong to the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people, and should be granted to landless settlers only, in amounts not exceeding one hundred and sixty acres of land. ”

“ We should be more inclined to believe that this public land was occupied under some regulations, in order to prevent disputes; but if such regulations existed we know nothing about them. There was no survey made of the public land which was from time to time acquired, but there were certainly general boundaries fixed for the purpose of determining what had become public property. The lands which were sold and given were of necessity surveyed and fixed by boundaries. ”

“ Very certain it is, that we need to watch jealously the distribution of the public lands, to keep them from the grasp of avarice and intrigue, and to hold out the utmost inducements to actual settlers to till and own the soil. ”

“ Any man may acquire an estancia by location upon the public lands and the payment of a nominal price per acre; so the country is settling up with those who have fled from the conditions that exist in Chili, free thought, free speech, free air, and{543} free land being their inducement. ”

“ Hence it is, that in so many constitutions, charters of cities, etc., the exercise of the higher rights of citizenship is conditioned by the possession of a certain quantity of land, and that landownership is considered as a species of public function. ”

“ The larger the number of land-owners in a [Pg 210] country, the more who have an interest in the soil they till, the more free and independent citizens there are interested in maintenance of public order. ”

“ When grants of public lands may be allowed, necessary for the encouragement of important public improvements, the proceeds of the sale of such lands, and not the lands themselves, should be so applied. ”

“ With the acquisition of new territory, new fields of enterprise have been opened, population has spread over the public lands, villages and towns have sprung up on them, and all the industries and institutions of a civilized and prosperous people have been established, with the church and school-house by their side, before the surveyor with his quadrant and line appeared. ”

“ Of the three kinds of land the common mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords in the days of feudalism, has generally remained public property to this day. The pleasant green commons or squares which occur in the midst of towns and cities in England and the United States most probably originated from the coalescence of adjacent mark-communities, whereby the border-land used in common by all was brought into the centre of the new aggregate. ”

“ The survey and subdivision of public lands has been expedited to have lots ready for settlers and to insure the equitable distribution of public lands by preventing the acquisition of big landholdings. ”

“ Public 'policy,' in that sense, doesn't at all mean public 'use.' If land is wanted for a road, or a fort, or a canal, it must be taken, under a law, by appraisement, or the thing could not be had at all ”

“ Those who prefer topographical metaphors might imagine a quilted pattern of public and private land, with legal rules specifying that certain areas, beaches say, can never be privately owned, and accompanying rules giving public rights of way through private land if there is a danger that access to the commons might otherwise be blocked. ”

“ In other cases, where the public interest is at stake, the state determines the area of land to be planted, and allows the proprietors to perform the work if they will; if they refuse to do so, it attends to the matter itself, taking care that its proceedings shall be as inoffensive to the people as they can be made, and be at the same time effective. ”

“ Regarding our public domain as chiefly valuable to provide homes for the industrious and enterprising, I am not prepared to recommend any essential change in the land system, except by modifications in favor of the actual settler and an extension of the preemption principle in certain cases, for reasons and on grounds which will be fully developed in the reports to be laid before you. ”

“ The owner of a piece of land, who had built a house or inclosed 20 or 40 acres of it, had the benefit of this universal custom, as well as the party who owned no land. Everybody used the open, uninclosed country which produced nutritious grasses as a public common or which their horses, cattle, hogs, and sheep could run and graze. ”

“ Gentlemen, of our interior administration, the public lands constitute a highly important part. This is a subject of great interest, and it ought to attract much more attention than it has hitherto received, especially from the people of the Atlantic States. The public lands are public property. They belong to 350 the people of all the States. A vast portion of them is composed of territories which were ceded by individual States to the United States, after the close of the Revolutionary war, and before the adoption of the present Constitution. ”

“ The system of land surveys; the reservations for schools, internal improvements, military sites, and public buildings; the preemption claims of settlers; the establishment of land offices, and boards of inquiry, to determine the validity of land titles; the modes of entry, and sale, and of conferring titles; the protection of the lands from trespass and waste ”

“ Our system for the disposal of the public lands, originating with the fathers of the Republic, has been improved as experience pointed the way, and gradually adapted to the growth and settlement of our Western States and Territories. ”

“ The character of the lands in the public domain is decided by the surveyors who execute contracts from the General Land Office for subdividing or staking the country off into townships and sections, according to our American system. ”

“ ARID LANDS. We favor cession, subject to the homestead laws, of the arid public lands to the states and territories in which they lie, under such congressional restrictions as to disposition, reclamation, and occupancy by settlers as will secure the maximum benefits to the people. ”

“ The occupant might cultivate, pasture, it, or, if the possessed a good site, and had the thrift and enterprise, he might build a town upon it. In the disposition of the public lands this state of things called for peculiar legislation different in toto from that required in an unsettled country. ”

“ That the public lands should be distributed as widely as possible among the people, and should be disposed of either under the pre-emption or homestead lands, or sold in reasonable quantities, and to none but actual occupants, at the minimum price established by the Government. ”

“ Do you not know numbers of neighbourhoods where woods, and Commons, and fields used to be open to pedestrians, and now they must walk, even in the country, on straight roads between hedges? The more that fields and woods are closed, the more does every atom of Common land, everywhere, all over England, become of importance to the people of every class, except that which owns its own parks and woods. ”

“ Giving up the plan of using these lands for ever as a fund either for revenue or distribution—ceasing to hug them as a great treasure—renouncing the idea of administering them with a view to regulate and control the industry and population of the states, or of keeping in subjection and dependence the states, or the people of any portion of the union, the task will be comparatively easy of striking out a plan for the final adjustment of the land question on just and equitable principles. ”

“ Scattered through this territory are extended tracts of land, which have not been converted into individual property. These lands, which consist mainly of forests, belong to the whole population, and the government, which receives the revenues, uses or ought to use them in the interest of all. ”

“ The right of all men to participate in the benefits of the soil by the State ownership thereof can be claimed from the fact that land is a natural agent, and that the value of land arises from, and is maintained by, the aggregation of population and the exercise of industry by a people. (Cheers.) The value thus imparted belongs to the people, and not to an individual or a class. That a national land system would be the best for society and good government is self-evident. ”

“ Besides, when the land has been all taken up, and has come into the hands of a small number of the community, these, from being the possessors of property, generally obtain the governing power, and form a land-aristocracy class. ”

“ Numbers of acts are passed every session which assert the right of the state over the land, and transfer it from one man, or set of men, to another. It seems to me that the principle is clear, and rests upon the assertion of the state's ownership of the land ”

“ The only conclusion to which we are brought by this prolonged examination of authorities is that community in land has not yet been historically proved. Here are scholars who have maintained that they could prove from original authorities that nations originally cultivated the soil in common ”

“ Both the nation and the state by their agents have encouraged the people to buy land, and they have in that way derived great benefits; the nation by the federal constitution and the state by its constitution and statutes said to me that land could be acquired as absolute property ”

“ We are so used to the treatment of land as individual property, it is so thoroughly recognized in our laws, manners, and customs, that the vast majority of people never think of questioning it; but look upon it as necessary to the use of land. They are unable to conceive, or at least it does not enter their heads to conceive, of society as existing or as possible without the reduction of land to private possession. ”

“ Our land system is too often regarded as, on the one hand, of so reverend an antiquity that to touch it is to break with all the traditions of Englishmen, and on the other, as so great an improvement, in a democratic direction, on the system of the past, that we cannot materially improve it. ”