198 Bureau of Farmers' Institutes. 



tinue to influence human life long after they have entirely lost all 

 application and fitness to a later environment, and have there- 

 fore become at least useless, in many cases positively detrimental 

 to prosperity. Such ideas and beliefs, inherited from past genera- 

 tions and still cherished, without reflection or consideration of 

 altered circumstances, dictate to a lamentable extent the policy 

 that governs in our time the management of the public domain, 

 fitill the property of the people. 



Time was, say a couple of centuries ago, or even not quite so 

 far back as that, if you like, when every foot of extension of the 

 civilized occupation of this country back into the wild interior, 

 every increase in population not positively vicious, was in many 

 ways a real and solid gain to the people of the American prov- 

 inces. Occupying as our forefathers did but a narrow strip of 

 land along the Atlantic coast, with only inchoate manufactures, 

 very slow and uncertain communication between different sec- 

 tions, and agriculture not much more than adequate to provide 

 for very modest living, the one thing that was wanted before all 

 others was development of the nation. The father of a large 

 family of stalwart sons and daughters was most distinctly a pub- 

 lic benefactor. As the children moved westward, bringing into 

 cultivation acre after acre of new soil, and thus supplying better 

 and better the needs of a growing population and enlarging the 

 material resources of the common stock, they were laying broad 

 and deep the foundations of the future greatness of the nation, 

 and every pioneer deserved a godspeed from all well wishers for 

 mankind. If any central authority had at that period exercised 

 effective control over the unoccupied lands that stretched off, 

 seemingly without limit, to the west, it could not possibly have 

 done a better thing for all concerned than to facilitate by every 

 means within its power the taking up of these lands as fast as 

 possible by anybody who could be induced to occupy and culti- 

 vate them. Pioneering and homesteatling were philanthropic oc- 

 cupations of the very first order of necessity and merit. 



But it must never be forgotten that the circumstances of the 

 eeventeentb century in this country were radically different from 



