118 LAND AND LABOR. 



In the first place, under the homestead provisions, the 

 railroad companies could not have created and fostered 

 vast monopolies of the lands, nor have peopled the 

 public domain with aliens ; neither could they have 

 wholesaled the people's heritage to alien capitalists, 

 for speculation and colonization. The lands would 

 still have been held for homes for our own people and 

 the naturalized citizen. The system of tenant farm- 

 ing, now so prevalent, would not have received the 

 unnatural development that has marked its growth in 

 the last twenty years, and the railroad companies 

 would not have raked Europe for aliens to occupy the 

 people's lands. But the railroad companies, under 

 the grants as they now stand, do all these things that 

 are not possible under the homestead provisions, and 

 extort from the people a far greater amount, in their 

 speculative operations, than they would receive from 

 the whole body of the lands when disposed of under 

 the homestead provisions. The government does not 

 need the revenues derived from the sale of the lands ; 

 from other sources there are abundant receipts to meet 

 all expenditures. But good roads, by which every 

 square mile of our territory may be easily reached, are 

 of the first importance. 



To no better use could the revenues derived from 

 the sale of the public lands be put, than to the build- 

 ing of a system of railroads that would best promote 

 that object, and for educational purposes. And the 

 true interests of the railroads would be best served in 

 having the lands along their lines occupied in small 

 tracts by a people who owned the soil they cultivated. 

 Under such a system monopolies of the lands would 



