26 



THE GRANGER MOVEMENT 



homestead law, which made it possible for each head of a 

 family to obtain a free homestead on the public domain. In 

 the very next year a million acres of government land were thus 

 occupied and by 1880 over fifty-five million had been filed on 



under this law. Under the somewhat similar provisions of the 

 timber-culture act of 1873, nine million more acres were occupied, 

 and the grant by Congress in 1862 of nearly ten million acres 

 of land to the states for agricultural colleges operated in the 

 same direction, for much of this land passed into private posses- 

 sion at merely nominal prices. 2 The enormous grants to rail- 

 way companies during this period also helped to make land 

 available to settlers. 3 The corporations were eager to dispose 

 of their land at low prices in order to attract settlers; and they 

 were enabled to build railroads which made accessible, not only 

 their own lands, but the reserved alternate sections of the govern- 

 ment as well. They served as an intermediary between the 

 people and the desired land, bringing the one to the other and 

 making profitable the cultivation of the land by furnishing a 

 comparatively cheap means of transportation to the distant 

 markets. 



The causes which led to the existence of a surplus industrial 

 population were various. Probably the most effective was the 



1 Decrease. 



2 Donaldson, The Public Domain, 351-355, 360; A. B. Hart, " The Disposition 

 of Our Public Lands," in Quarterly Journal of Economics, i. 176 (January, 1887); 

 E. D. Fite, Social and Industrial Conditions in the North during the Civil War, n. 



3 Hart, in Quarterly Journal of Economics, i. 179; W. G. Moody, Land and Labor 

 in the United States, 88-in. 



