In short, the American people have failed to see the
essential injustice of private property in land, because
as yet they have not felt its full effects. This public
domain — the vast extent of land yet to be reduced
to private possession, the enormous common to which the
faces of the energetic were always turned, has been the
great fact that, since the days when the first
settlements began to fringe the Atlantic Coast, has
formed our national character and colored our national
thought. It is not that we have eschewed a titled
aristocracy and abolished primogeniture; that we elect
all our officers from school director up to president;
that our laws run in the name of the people, instead of
in the name of a prince; that the State knows no
religion, and our judges wear no wigs — that we
have been exempted from the ills that Fourth of July
orators used to point to as characteristic of the effete
despotisms of the Old World. The general
intelligence, the general comfort, the active invention,
the power of adaptation and assimilation, the free,
independent spirit, the energy and hopefulness that have
marked our people, are not causes, but results -- they
have sprung from unfenced land. This public
domain has been the transmuting force which has turned
the thriftless, unambitious European peasant into the
self-reliant Western farmer; it has given a consciousness
of freedom even to the dweller in crowded cities, and has
been a wellspring of hope even to those who have never
thought of taking refuge upon it. The child of the
people, as he grows to manhood in Europe, finds all the
best seats at the banquet of life marked "taken," and
must struggle with his fellows for the crumbs that fall,
without one chance in a thousand of forcing or sneaking
his way to a seat. In America, whatever his condition,
there has always been the consciousness that the public
domain lay behind him; and the knowledge of this fact,
acting and reacting, has penetrated our whole national
life, giving to it generosity and independence,
elasticity and ambition. All that we are proud of
in the American character; all that makes our conditions
and institutions better than those of older countries, we
may trace to the fact that land has been cheap in the
United States, because new soil has been open to the
emigrant.
But our advance has reached the Pacific. Further west
we cannot go, and increasing population can but expand
north and south and fill up what has been passed over.
North, it is already filling up the valley of the Red
River, pressing into that of the Saskatchewan and
pre-empting Washington Territory; south, it is covering
western Texas and taking up the arable valleys of New
Mexico and Arizona.
The republic has entered upon a new era, an era in
which the monopoly of the land will tell with
accelerating effect. The great fact which has been so
potent is ceasing to be. The public domain is almost gone
— a very few years will end its influence, already
rapidly failing. I do not mean to say that there will be
no public domain. For a long time to come there will be
millions of acres of public lands carried on the books of
the Land Department. But it must be remembered that the
best part of the continent for agricultural purposes is
already overrun, and that it is the poorest land that is
left. It must be remembered that what remains comprises
the great mountain ranges, the sterile deserts, the high
plains fit only for grazing. And it must be remembered
that much of this land which figures in the reports as
open to settlement is unsurveyed land, which has been
appropriated by possessory claims or locations which do
not appear until the land is returned as surveyed.
California figures on the books of the Land Department as
the greatest land state of the Union, containing nearly
100,000,000 acres of public land — something like
one-twelfth of the whole public domain. Yet so much of
this is covered by railroad grants or held in the way of
which I have spoken; so much consists of untillable
mountains or plains which require irrigation; so much is
monopolized by locations which command the water, that as
a matter of fact it is difficult to point the immigrant
to any part of the state where he can take up a farm on
which he can settle and maintain a family, and so men,
weary of the quest, end by buying land or renting it on
shares. It is not that there is any real scarcity of land
in California — for, an empire in herself,
California will some day maintain a population as large
as that of France — but appropriation has got ahead
of the settler and manages to keep just ahead of him. ...
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