The Dawn of a New Constructive Era 41 



the tendency is to go further and further with this. The 

 tendency is for the public to have an interest in everything 

 going on all over this country, whether commonly called private 

 or public. For instance, the public will say you have 70 million 

 acres of good land lying idle here; you won't be permitted to 

 leave that land lying idle in the United States when we need it 

 to produce food for all of us, particularly at a time when the per- 

 petuation of our very national existence may depend on our 

 ability to feed ourselves and our allies. 



Now, what is the purpose of all this talk about what hap- 

 pened fifty years ago, forty years ago and now? I simply want 

 to develop this proposition, gentlemen : that the time has come 4;/ Land 

 when every acre of land that will produce anything at all has Has a Value 

 some value and should be put to use, that the time is past 

 when fertile lands can be had in the great West for the taking; 

 the great bulk of those lands are all taken and yet farm products 

 continued to rise in price even before the war. If these seventy 

 million idle acres can produce anything, the trend of develop- 

 ment and increased production is bound to swing back to the 

 South and East. Take the cattle business as an illustration. 

 Out in Arizona or New Mexico, where it takes forty acres to 

 keep a cow, men are very freely paying $1.25 to $5.00 an acre 

 for the land, and they are glad to get it. We sold last year 

 44,000 acres of land in an Indian Reservation in California at 

 public auction. Anybody could buy all he wanted. It was 

 picked-over land. The Indians had been allotted the best of it, 

 and the homesteaders had taken what they wanted, and this was 

 the tail end. It was appraised at $56,000, and we sold it for 

 $119,000. Last summer we opened the Colville Indian Reserva- 

 tion in Washington, of about 400,000 acres. That was also 

 remaining land — after the Indians had been allotted the best ' 

 lands. It was very rough and much of it very dry. We held 

 registrations out there for that land, and we had 90,000 applica- 

 tions to register for 3,000 farms. In Dakota a year and a half 

 ago we had 1 10,000 acres on the Standing Rock Indian Reserva- 

 tion that was appraised at from $2.50 to $8.00 an acre, subject 

 to the Homestead law. A man could get only so much of it; he 

 had to homestead it and pay the price, too. We had 30,000 ap- 

 plications for that land, and they took every acre of it. This 

 spring, just before I came down, I signed instructions for some 

 land we appraised two years ago to be appraised at $2.00 more 



