132 MAJOR JOHN F. LACEY 



ship, stimulating individual effort, was the inspiration of 

 the settlement of the great Northwest. 



A few years ago the Turkish government brought for- 

 ward an ancient claim, 250 years old, by which it was pro- 

 posed to take for the crown the lands surrounding the 

 city of Joppa. Private owners began to allow their 

 property to go to decay. They quit watering the orange 

 trees, and the country was threatened with ruin. The 

 claim was abandoned, or the land would have returned 

 once more to its mother, the desert. 



Before the white settlements in America, the title was 

 held by the Indians in common. A number of misguided 

 gentlemen today are urging the seizure of all lands 

 through the proposed medium of a single tax. They 

 claim to have something original in this proposition, but 

 it is not, it is aboriginal. It was not only necessary to 

 provide for good surveys and titles, but a free govern- 

 ment, administered by free men, was even more essen- 

 tial. 



The Ordinance of 1787 provided a system out of which 

 has grown all the subsequent territorial organizations in 

 the United States. The old Northwest, bounded on the 

 west by the Mississippi and on the south by the Ohio, was 

 larger than France, and larger than either the Austrian 

 or German Empire. 



The political jurisdiction of the remote states on the 

 seashore would have been a great handicap to the growth 

 of the new country. Religious freedom, exclusion of 

 negro slavery, the reservation of each sixteenth section 

 for school purposes, were the great forces in the Ordi- 

 nance of 1787. This Ordinance was not only a landmark 

 in our history, but was a turning point in the history of 

 civilization. The main features of the Ordinance, and of 

 our national Constitution, which was also made in 1787, 

 now seem so natural and reasonable that it is hard to 



