itable to our country, so honorable to the genius of our people, it will 

 be found in any final analysis of causes, tliat the superiority of Ameri- 

 cans in that great exposition resulted mainly from their superior free- 

 dom and the greater competition between mind and mind untrarameled 

 by Government interference. I believe it will be found we are best 

 serving the cause of religion and science and all those great primary 

 rights which we did not delegate to the Congress or the States, but 

 left the people free to enjoy and maintain them. 



Mr. Chairman, leaving these general reflections, I come to the spe- 

 cial question of our geological surveys. Leaving out of the account 

 all the Government works proper, such as light-houses, such as the 

 survey of our coast, such as the survey for our rivers and harbors, 

 such as the surveys of the lakes, of military surveys proper— leaving 

 all these out, we have spent almost $2,000,000 in the last twelve years 

 for purely scientific surveys. While the results have been very grati- 

 fying, while they have been exceedingly interesting to men of sci- 

 ence, and also of commercial value to the country, I believe we hav& 

 spent a large part of that money upon an unwise system, and in a 

 way which has tended to discourage the private pursuit of science- 

 by our people. 



We have made the Government a forjnidable and crushing com- 

 petitor of private students of science ; and I think we have in some 

 cases gone beyond the fdir limit of what the Government ought to 

 do in the way of scientific investigatiou. We have had the War De- 

 partment with two or three separate expeditions exploring our west- 

 ern territory. We have had two separate organizations from the 

 Interior Department also exploring; and it has all been done on a 

 system which has invited and fostered a personal seeking of favor 

 from Congress. There have been good men, intelligent men, scien- 

 tific men, who have sought for authority and aid to make scientific 

 investigations in fields which private citizens were exploring; and in 

 employing so many separate and independent parties there have been 

 many cases, if not of collision, at least of overlapping and duplica- 

 tion in the same field of examination. It seems to me it is high time 

 for us, first, to restrict our scientific work plainly and narrowly within 

 the limits of the rules I have tried to lay down ; and second, to con- 

 solidate the scientific part of our work of survey under one responsi- 

 ble head ; and having done that, with all the economy which can be 

 fairly used, let us make our outlay only in the direction of public 

 necessity. ^ 



Now, lest some one should think I am attacking the geological sur- 

 veys, I hasten to say that it is absolutely vital to an intelligent dis- 

 charge of our duties as trustees or rather as owners of the great public 

 domain yet unsurveyed and unsold, to give to our people all the light 

 that science can shed upon the character and quality of those lauds. 



While I may doubt the propriety of making at once the whole 

 change proposed in this bill, it is perfectly clear to my mind that we 

 have reached a natural crisis in the management and disposition of 

 our public domain. We have now reached the foot-hills of the great 

 Rocky Mountain chain ; and the old plans, the old methods, both of 

 survey and of settlement, are in the main no longer applicable. Of 

 what possible use can it be to checker-board the slojies and the tops 

 of mountains that are full of ores with the old ^\ s'l ;m ni sections, 

 half sections, and quarter sections ? 



To say that the old plan has worked well for a hundred years is to 

 praise our past pro})erly ; but to say that the same plan will work 

 well for the next hundred vt'ars is to sav the niatrhldcks. gnn-tlints, 



