RAILROAD LAND GRANTS. 107 



tory does not furnish parallel nor precedent. For our 

 system of tenant farming a precedent is found ; and 

 for our large landed estates something approaching 

 parallel conditions. - But for the robbery of a people, 

 by their own government, that aliens may have un- 

 limited enjoyment of their heritage, for the especial 

 benefit of domestic and alien speculators, as has been 

 done in our case, no precedent exists. 



A good illustration of the wholesale robbery of the 

 people for the benefit of alien capitalists and specula- 

 tors is found in the following item clipped from the 

 New York Tribune of March 6, 1883. 



" " Rumors that the Northern Pacific Railroad Company had 

 completed the sale of some four million acres of land to a for- 

 eign syndicate have been recently revived. At the office of 

 the railroad company it was said yesterday that the negotia- 

 tions were in the same condition that they had been for several 

 months. The company has something over four million acres 

 of land east of the Missouri River which it has offered for sale 

 at about $4 an acre. The lands have not been sold, it was said, 

 but probably the syndicate would take them as soon as it had 

 completed its arrangements." 



Our homestead laws limit the sales of the public 

 domain to lots of one hundred and sixty acres each, 

 but railroad plutocrats are specially privileged to sell 

 to alien and domestic monopolists in lots of millions 

 of acres, and absorb all that joins them. 



The spectacle of a great nation, in point of popula- 

 tion and general intelligence standing first in the great 

 sisterhood of modern civilization, in the hands of a 

 class of speculators who control the government, waste 

 and squander the nation's heritage, and play with the 



