1905 FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 33 



absorbed into great individual tracts the gigantic operations of the men who 



and held for speculative and stock- are opposing any change in our land 



grazing purposes. I speak from per- system. 



sonal knowledge and observation when This is not an alarmist's statement ; 



I assert that in some of the western it is a fact, readily substantiated and 



states tracts of land are owned and which is well-known and admitted by 



held in blocks of thousands of acres, every man who is personally familiar 



many of which could be subdivided with the public land conditions in the 



into 80 and i6o-acre tracts, each sup- West. 



porting a family in as great comfort As against this policy of tremendous 



and plenty as the most productive tract land operations the efforts of eastern 



of similar size in the fertile Mississippi organizations and associations looking 



Valley states. These lands have been to the creation of improved opportuni- 



taken, under the above-named land ties and facilities for the poor man 



laws, out of the public doman of the who desires to get a piece of ground 



United States, and to-day support only and a home are all but futile. While 



a few head of stock, or lie entirely idle, it may not be practicable at this time to 



The fact that many western men provide for the movement of a great 



contend that the abrogation of these number of poor people out of the cities 



maleficent laws would retard the "de- onto the lands of the West although 



velopment of the West" is of no sig- this is being demonstrated in a small 



nificance other than to accentuate the way with considerable success by the 



fact that western land men are more Salvation Army it is in reality the 



interested in immediate personal bene- surplus man in any community who 



fit than in the creation of a great em- depresses that community. There are 



pire of small agricultural homes. thousands of men in the East who have 



FAILURE TO ENFORCE THE LAND LAWS. SaVe . d . "P . SOme . ^ m ne y and w !j 



would to-day gladly escape from daily 



For years and years, after valiant and precarious wage earning and go 

 but futile endeavor to administer these out upon the land and relieve the pres- 

 laws in such manner as to prevent sure, if they knew where to go and 

 fraud, Commissioners of the General how to turn. It will be a compara- 

 Land Office, Secretaries of the Interi- tively easy task to show them the way 

 or, and even Presidents of the United to the fertile lands of the West, as they 

 States have recommended to Congress are developed, provided the lands are 

 their repeal, as constituting a menace not previously absorbed by the specu- 

 to the present and future wellbeing of lator. Not the least important, there- 

 the nation ; yet it is a sinister fact that fore, of the many "paramount" ques- 

 sufficiently strong influences have been tions before the American people to- 

 exerted upon Congress to prevent any day is the saving of our great western 

 radical action. It is true that some land resource for real settlement and 

 ten years ago there occurred what pur- the aversion of the dangers of land 

 ported to be a grand overhauling of monopoly. 



the land laws whereby several pages of Nothing affects social conditions 



revision and reform were placed upon more than the subdivision of tracts of 



the statute book; but it soon transpired land, all the way from the great ranch 



that the powers of the land grabbers of a hundred thousand acres into small 



had been in no way curtailed. The of- free-hold farms, down to the division 



ficial statement of the present Secre- of the five-acre suburban tract into 



tary of the Interior two years ago that, acre homes. The question is broadly 



aside from the sociological features of national ; it is one which, properly 



the question, over one hundred million worked out, will solve many of our 



dollars in actual cash value had been most perplexing problems, and one 



lost to the people of the United States which opens to its students higher and 



through the operation of the timber broader vistas the more deeply and 



and stone law, is sufficient evidence of aggressively it is studied. 



