LAND TENURE AND LAND POLICY 677 



acres disposed of, but only 100,000,000 acres of it directly to cul- 

 tivators that is to say, six-sevenths of the land has been put into the 

 hands of people who did not want to use it themselves, but to make 

 a profit from those who do use it. A generation hence our children 

 will look with astonishment at the recklessness with which the public 

 domain has been squandered. It will seem to them we must have 

 been mad, for certainly our whole land policy, with here and there 

 a gleam of common sense shooting through it, seems to have been 

 dictated by the desire to get rid of our lands as fast as possible. 



Is our policy calculated to give to all men an equal chance ? We 

 have seen what it is how we are enabling speculators to rob settlers; 

 how we are by every means enhancing the tax which the many must 

 pay to the few; how we are making away with the heritage of our 

 children, and putting in immense bodies into the hands of a few indi- 

 viduals the soil from which the coming millions of our people must 

 draw their support. If we continue this policy a few years, the 

 public domain will all be gone; the homestead law and pre-emption 

 law will remain upon the statute books but to remind the poor man 

 of the good time past, and we shall find ourselves embarrassed by 

 all the difficulties which beset the statesmen of Europe the social 

 disease of England; the seething discontent of France. 



Was there ever national blunder so great ever national crime so 

 tremendous as ours in dealing with the land ? It is not in the heat 

 and flush of conquest that we are thus doing what has been done in 

 every country under the sun where a ruling class has been built up 

 and the masses condemned to hopeless toil; it is not in ignorance of 

 true political principles and in the conscientious belief that the God- 

 appointed order of things is that the many should serve the few. We 

 are monopolizing our land deliberately our land, not the land of a 

 conquered nation, and we are doing it while prating of the equal 

 rights of the citizen and of the brotherhood of men. 



Nor can we flatter ourselves that the inequality in condition which 

 we are creating will right itself by easy and peaceful means. It is not 

 merely present inequality which we are creating, but a tendency to 

 further inequality. When we allow one man to take the land which 

 should belong to a hundred, and give to a corporation the soil from 

 which a million must shortly draw their subsistence, we are not only 

 giving in the present wealth to the few by taking it from the many, 

 but we are putting it in the power of a few to levy a constant and an 

 increasing tax upon the many, and we are increasing the tendency 



