In short, the American people have failed to see the essential injustice
of private property in land, because as yet they have not felt its full effects.
This public domain — the vast extent of land yet to be reduced to
private possession, the enormous common to which the faces of the energetic
were
always turned, has been the great fact that, since the days when the first
settlements began to fringe the Atlantic Coast, has formed our national character
and colored our national thought. It is not that we have eschewed
a titled aristocracy and abolished primogeniture; that we elect all our officers
from school director up to president; that our laws run in the name of the
people, instead of in the name of a prince; that the State knows no religion,
and our judges wear no wigs — that we have been exempted from the
ills that Fourth of July orators used to point to as characteristic of the
effete despotisms
of the Old World. The general intelligence, the general comfort, the
active invention, the power of adaptation and assimilation, the free, independent
spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have marked our people, are not causes,
but results -- they have sprung from unfenced land. This public
domain has been the transmuting force which has turned the thriftless, unambitious
European peasant into the self-reliant Western farmer; it has given a consciousness
of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has been a wellspring
of hope even to those who have never thought of taking refuge upon it. The
child of the people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the best
seats at the banquet of life marked "taken," and must struggle
with his fellows for the crumbs that fall, without one chance in a thousand
of forcing or sneaking his way to a seat. In America, whatever his condition,
there has always been the consciousness that the public domain lay behind
him; and the knowledge of this fact, acting and reacting, has penetrated
our whole national life, giving to it generosity and independence, elasticity
and ambition. All that we are proud of in the American character;
all that makes our conditions and institutions better than those of older
countries, we may trace to the fact that land has been cheap in the United
States, because new soil has been open to the emigrant.
But our advance has reached the Pacific. Further west we cannot go, and
increasing population can but expand north and south and fill up what has
been passed over. North, it is already filling up the valley of the Red River,
pressing into that of the Saskatchewan and pre-empting Washington Territory;
south, it is covering western Texas and taking up the arable valleys of New
Mexico and Arizona.
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 is 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.
But it must be remembered that the best part of the continent for agricultural
purposes is already overrun, and that it is the poorest land that is left.
It must be remembered that what remains comprises the great mountain ranges,
the sterile deserts, the high plains fit only for grazing. And it must be
remembered that much of this land which figures in the reports as open to
settlement is unsurveyed land, which has been appropriated by possessory
claims or locations which do not appear until the land is returned as surveyed.
California figures on the books of the Land Department as the greatest land
state of the Union, containing nearly 100,000,000 acres of public land — something
like one-twelfth of the whole public domain. Yet so much of this is covered
by railroad grants or held in the way of which I have spoken;
so much consists of untillable mountains or plains which require irrigation;
so much is monopolized by locations which command the water, that as a matter
of fact it is difficult to point the immigrant to any part of the state where
he can take up a farm on which he can settle and maintain a family, and so
men, weary of the quest, end by buying land or renting it on shares. It is
not that there is any real scarcity of land in California — for, an
empire in herself, California will some day maintain a population as large
as that
of France — but appropriation has got ahead of the settler and manages
to keep just ahead of him. ... read
the whole chapter