674 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



D. Land Policy and Land Reform 



215. THE EFFECTS OF OUR PUBLIC LAND POLICY 1 

 BY BENJAMIN H. HIBBARD 



In looking back over the history of the United States land policies 

 what judgment is to be passed upon them ? As a means of deriving 

 a federal revenue the failure has been complete, since more money 

 has been paid out than has been received in connection with the public 

 domain. The next main plan was to put the land into the hands of 

 those who needed it and who would use it. This idea came to per- 

 meate the views of many congressmen a hundred years ago, and after 

 some forty years of struggle and debate the principle was put into 

 complete practice so far as the Homestead law was applicable. There 

 were in Congress and in the administrative offices a number of men 

 throughout the long period of debate who wished sincerely to devise 

 means of holding the land out of the clutches of speculators and secure 

 it to settlers. This policy requires clearer vision for its realization 

 than any number of these leaders had. To put land into the hands 

 of settlers was no guarantee that it would stay there. The pre- 

 emption laws prescribed settlement and improvement only till such 

 time as payment should be made, after which the land could be dis- 

 posed of at will. The Homestead law v was, and is, the outstanding 

 example of land given to settlers in such a manner as to compel its 

 retention for a considerable time by the settler. And this was for 

 but five years. Where the law was rigidly enforced it was difficult 

 for a man to get hold of more than 160 acres of land under the Home- 

 stead Act, but it was not difficult, by collusion, to hire men to home- 

 stead for the owner of a herd of cattle and so keep the strategic 

 points in the hands of a few men. Or it was not even necessary to 

 resort to illegal means. The man interested in holding a big tract 

 of land was in a multitude of instances able to do so by buying out 

 the homesteader who was fortunate enough to get hold of the desir- 

 able tracts from the settler's standpoint. This sort of thing did not, 

 and could not, take place where most of the land was desirable for 

 agricultural purposes. The worst feature of the Homestead law was 

 its extension over land not adapted to it. It was designed for the 

 western part of the humid belt of prairie land and by no means for 

 the arid and the forested regions, yet many a useless homestead was 



1 Adapted from Monthly Bulletin of Economic and Social Intelligence (Inter- 

 national Institute of Agriculture), January, 1916, pp. 115-17. 



