5 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ried step by step up to the Supreme Court at Washington. As a mat- 

 ter of fact the reports of this court teem with these cases, wherefrom 

 the reader can imagine something of the routine litigants have under- 

 gone to get there. All these hearings and rehearings, appeals and 

 new trials, and further appeals, have to be attended and argued by. 

 counsel in behalf of the Government's own grantee, the defendant 

 company. And since, should the company finally secure its title to 

 the land the Government had already granted it, it can only sell it for 

 two or three dollars an acre, and lawyers' bills are not apt to be pre- 

 pared on a diminuendo scale, the public mind can now begin to appre- 

 ciate how recklessly magnanimous a "gift" this land-grant was on 

 the part of the Government, and the extent of Mr. Hudson's charity in 

 being able to " make allowance " for the recipients ! 



But the above is not all. This gift, Mr. Hudson himself admits, 

 has to be ratified, and legislators bribed to ratify it. He would come 

 nearer the truth did he assert that it has to be ratified at every session 

 of Congress. I have in my mind a company whose land-grant was 

 received considerably more than twenty years ago, and which has 

 earned it by building and operating its entire road, and yet I doubt if 

 the lawyers of that company could, without considerable research, men- 

 tion a year in which that grant had not been a matter of attack upon 

 the floor of Congress. Nor is it yet at rest there, although that road 

 is operating over three thousand miles of trackage. Mr. Hudson says 

 that the men who receive these dubious "gifts of empire" "bribe 

 legislators and buy up public officials," to prevent adverse action as to 

 the ratification. Doubtless he knows of what he speaks. Our legis- 

 lators are elected by the people, and to the people they are resj^onsible. 

 But the fact that our legislators do not, as a rule, allow land-grant 

 questions to rest, and are constantly demanding adverse action, even 

 in cases as old as the one I have just referred to, does not look as if 

 land-grant companies had largely added to the expense of receiving 

 their already costly present of lands by large "bribes to legislators 

 and purchase of public officials" ; for certainly they have not pre- 

 vented adverse action upon these grants to any very memorable 

 extent. 



Mr. Hudson speaks of money-grants as well as land-grants to a 

 transcontinental railroad. In the throes of a bloody civil war it is to 

 the eternal credit of one patriotic Congress that it did vote a loan to a 

 transcontinental railway company to enable it to connect the shores of 

 two oceans whose communications otherwise were at the mercy of 

 pirates and privateers, fitted out by a rival nation, interested in driv- 

 ing our commerce from every sea. But, with the necessity, the policy 

 ceased forever. In other cases, to make their heavily purchased 

 "gifts" available, the plan of mortgaging them was resorted to. 

 They have been so mortgaged, and, on the faith of the Government, 

 the bonds secured by these mortgages are now held by this people ; 



