218 INDIANA HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS 



hoped for rise in value. It is a subject well worthy of 

 our careful inquiry, whether our greediness has not 

 driven many good citizens to look further, without faring 

 better, while we have fared worse. Our settlements are 

 too sparse, and we ought to use all honorable means to 

 invite emigrants to fill up our waste lands. To do this 

 we must be more liberal. 



Scarce as timber now appears in our prairie country, 

 if it could be fairly distributed, it would be sufficient to 

 increase our population to ten times its present numbers. 

 Is there any one will presume to doubt that that would 

 fail to increase the value of land to ten times its present 

 intrinsic value? And there are other benefits that would 

 attend upon an increase of our population, which we can- 

 not enjoy while dwelling so isolated, scattered over such 

 a wide surface of country, which is far — far more im- 

 portant than boundless wealth. 



I need not tell you what benefits I allude to; for the 

 little monitor in the breast of every parent whose loca- 

 tion has prevented him from partaking of the benefits 

 of the village school, will speak to him in tones that he 

 cannot keep still, and tell him that his children are grow- 

 ing up into manhood, destitute of the first rudiments of a 

 common school education. 



He cannot hide that "still small voice" with the sooth- 

 ing salvo to the mind of the miser, that he is "Lord of all 

 I survey," while he stretches his eye over his vast domain 

 of a thousand uncultivated and unproductive acres. Be 

 assured, such a man owns too much land. It would have 

 been far better for him, individually, and far better for 

 society, if he had "claimed" no more land than he needed 

 for cultivation, and that the remainder had been occupied 

 by some of the thousand emigrants who have passed by 

 in seach of a "wider opening" further West. 



Are there any here who suppose that all this waste 

 land will forever lie waste? Let them look back to their 

 own native hills — there is no waste, and useless land 

 there; and but a few short years would roll away into 



