388 Presidential Addresses 



Every phase of the land policy of the United States 

 is, as it by right ought to be, directed to the up 

 building of the home-maker. The one sure test of 

 all public land legislation should be : does it help to 

 make and to keep prosperous homes ? If it does, the 

 legislation is good. If it does not, the legislation is 

 bad. Any legislation which has a tendency to give 

 land in large tracts to people who will lease it out to 

 tenants is undesirable. We do not want ever to 

 let our land policy be shaped so as to create a big 

 class of proprietors who rent to others. We want 

 to make the smaller men who, under such conditions 

 would rent, actual proprietors. We must shape our 

 policy so that these men themselves shall be the 

 land owners, the makers of homes, the keepers of 

 homes. 



Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their 

 purposes, have been twisted into an improper use, 

 so that there have grown up abuses under them by 

 which they tend to create a class of men who, under 

 one color and another, obtain large tracts of soil for 

 speculative purposes, or to rent out to others; and 

 there should be now a thorough scrutiny of our land 

 laws with the object of so amending them as to do 

 away with the possibility of such abuses. If it was 

 not for the national irrigation act we would be about 

 past the time when Uncle Sam could give every man 

 a farm. Comparatively little of our land is left 

 which is adapted to farming without irrigation. The 

 home-maker on the public land must hereafter, in the 

 great majority of cases, have water fon irrigation, 



