678 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



to the concentration of wealth not merely upon the land which is thus 

 monopolized, but all over the United States. Even if the large bodies 

 which we are giving away for nothing or selling to speculators for a 

 nominal price, are subdivided and sold for small farms, the mischief 

 we have done is not at an end. The capital of the settlers has been 

 taken from them, and put in large masses into the hands of the specu- 

 lators or railroad kings. The many are thereafter the poorer; the 

 few thereafter the richer. Our whole policy is of a piece everything 

 is tending with irresistible force to make us a nation of landlords and 

 tenants of great capitalists and their poverty stricken employees. 



The life of all the older nations shows the bitterness of the curse 

 of land monopolization; we cannot turn a page of their history with- 

 out finding the blood stabs and the tear marks it has left. But never 

 since commerce and manufacture grew up, and men began to engage 

 largely in other occupations than those connected directly with the 

 soil, has it been so important to prevent land monopolization as now. 

 The tendency of all the improved means and forms of production and 

 exchange of the greater and greater subdivision of labor, of the 

 enslavement of steam, of the utilization of electricity, of the ten 

 thousand great labor-saving appliances which modern invention has 

 brought forth is strongly and more strongly to extend the dominion 

 of capital and to make of labor its abject slave. 



When we reflect what land is; when we consider the relations 

 between it and labor; when we remember that to own the land upon 

 which a man must gain his subsistence is to all intents and purposes 

 to own the man himself, we cannot remain in doubt as to what should 

 be our policy in disposing of our public lands. We have no right to 

 dispose of them except to actual settlers to the men who really want 

 to use them; no right to sell them to speculators, to give them to rail- 

 road companies, or to grant them for agricultural colleges; no more 

 right to do so than we have to sell or to grant the labor of the people 

 who must some day live upon them, and to actual settlers we should 

 give them. Give, not sell. For we have no right to step between the 

 man who wants to use land and land which is yet unused, and to 

 demand of him a price for our permission to avail himself of his 

 Creator's bounty. And we should give but in limited quantities. For 

 while every man has a right to as much land as he can properly use, 

 no man has a right to any more, and when others do or will want it, 

 cannot take any more without infringing on their rights. One 

 hundred sixty acres is too much to give to one person; it is more 



