There remains something considerably less than 500,000,000 acres of
public land open to settlement. From this total amount careful and
conservative estimates deduct 300,000,000 acres as not suited to present
known methods of agriculture. The remaining 200,000,000 of the public
domain is passing into the hands of private individuals at a rate
exceeding 17,000,000 acres per year. At the present rate of diminution
the valuable public domain will be exhausted within the next decade and a
half.
The public domain lies largely in the States and Territories of Arizona,
Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming,
Colorado, South and North Dakota and California. In Texas, by virtue of
the agreement with the United States at the time of annexation, the title
to the public lands rests in the State. Liberal grants to the Western
States, of lands for school and institutional purposes, should be added
to the public domain in order to arrive at the total land available for
future settlement. These State lands are sold at prices somewhat below
the price of similar unimproved lands in the same locality, but on long
terms, and appeal about equally to the farmers and the speculators.
Their gradual disposal is placing in the treasuries of the Eastern
States a large school fund. The people are the beneficiaries under the
administration of the State land laws. A possible 50,000,000 acres of
farming land is available from this source after the National domain is
gone. It is well to note in passing that the value of the State lands
rises in proportion to that of surrounding lands. It is controlled and
disposed of with entirely different motives from those supposed to govern
the control and disposal of the lands of the general Government. It is
not free land in any sense of the word.
There are many who, remembering how the Western limit of grain raising
has crept westward across Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, look for a
repetition, or, more properly speaking, a continuation of this phenomenon
across the remaining public domain. It is true that we are only on
the borderland of plant-breeding possibilities. Spelz, or macaroni
wheat, Kaffir corn, and other drought-resistant cereals are making a
marvelous change in Western farming conditions, and in the certainty
of crop maturity; but as was stated before, under known conditions,
only two-fifths of all this Western land is now or will ever be adapted
to agriculture. On the remaining three-fifths, grazing, limited in
amount, will continue to be profitable. Within this large area lie
the giant ridges of the Rocky Mountains. Great gulches channel their
slopes. Valleys are strewn with the debris of ages of erosion. Rain
fall is scanty. Water supplied from artesian wells has only a limited
possibility of use. Irrigation is local in application, and limited not
only by stream supply, but also by the topography of the country. We have
reached the limits of the immediate adaptation of agriculture to climatic
conditions.
The area of the valuable public domain is measurable, but it is as yet
not measured. To the eastward of the area named there is some land still
open to settlement under the homestead act. What sort of land is it?
Land covered with glacial drift, swamps, hills, sandy land—the cast away
heritage of three generations of keen-eyed farmers. Greater stress of
need will bring some of this under the plow, but the fact remains that it
is undesirable land, viewed from the standpoint of the man who desires
not only a home, but a competence.
Alaska, with unknown but probably limited agricultural possibilities, is
already beginning to attract the attention of the speculative public.
Farmers are not greatly interested in the development of agriculture in a
region so remote and where the season precludes farming on a broad scale.
This somewhat lengthy statement of present day conditions is necessary in
order to understand the danger that menaces us as a people through the
alienation of the public domain from its legitimate uses. The land open
to settlement is passing, not into the possession of makers of homes, but
into the hands of speculators who are enriching themselves in the first
instance at the expense of the farmers, but ultimately at that of the
people at large.
The vast grants to the transcontinental railroads, by means of which the
Government paid private parties royally for building roads that have,
since their construction, charged the people for services rendered “all
the traffic will bear,” threw open, wide open, the doors to the land
speculator.
Railroad lands were bought up at a low figure by companies backed by
Eastern capital, just as today similar companies are buying up and
exploiting the Canadian Northwest. Settlers were sought for and brought
in by the car load. They were located on a quarter section of Government
land, and sold as much more of the adjoining speculators’ land as they
could be persuaded to buy. Under other firm names these same gentlemen
who exploited the public and corporation lands sold horses and farm
machinery to the new settler, taking mortgages as partial security on
crops not yet grown. The lean years came, and the land companies reaped
to the full their harvests.
So passed away from the people millions of acres of land in the Dakotas,
Nebraska, Kansas and the bordering States. Today that land is selling
back to the people at prices ranging from $10 to $40 an acre—land which I
have seen sold under the sheriff’s hammer at less than $1.00 an acre.
These land agencies are, in a thousand ways, busying themselves in the
securing of further lands for speculative purposes. The days of wholesale
grants having gone by, they are turning their attention to the lands of
the individual settler, and under their tutelage clerks, teachers, town
men and women, hired laborers, men who do not know wheat from barley or
rye from flax, are filing upon the last of the tillable public lands.
Under the homestead law, these settlers are allowed six months after
entry in which to establish homes on their land. This time is taken full
advantage of. Then a board shack is built and the law complied with by
the breaking of a few acres of sod. Eight months more of (constructive)
continuous residence, and the land becomes the property of the settler
upon a cash payment of $1.25 to $2.50 an acre, according to location. The
company furnishes the commutation money and “finds” a purchaser for the
claim. The shack is boarded up or moved off. The sod grows to weeds. The
settler, having made from $800 to $2,500 by a little enterprise and a
good deal of perjury, is eliminated from the problem.
This cat’s-paw of organized land plunder is securing for his principals
a large, a very large, percentage of all the public lands passing under
private ownership. It would be safe to say that one holding out of every
four passes into speculative hands. Judged by conditions, past and
existing, in the two Dakotas, this estimate might be doubled, and yet
fall within the facts. On this point see the report of the Commissioner
of the General Land Office for 1905. The land companies immediately
list their newly acquired lands, and by an ingenious system of “booms,”
carefully nursed and let loose at the proper time, they advance the price
of their lands to a point sometimes double or treble the original market
value of the raw prairies. This is wholly, or almost wholly, a paper
increase in value. Roads, schools, markets remain as before save for the
change wrought by the actual settlers.
This is, in essence, the same thing as the watering of railroad or
other stocks, and it is done for the same purpose—that the “ins”—the
land speculators—may fatten on the “outs”—the farmers. And if the land
valuations now obtaining in the fringe of settlement bordering the public
domain be from 25 to 75 per cent water, how about its effect on the land
values in older sections—say in Iowa, or Ohio, or Illinois?
Obviously the price will be enhanced. And the immediate, discernible
effect of that is to render it more difficult for the landless man to
become an owner. I have seen land go from $25 an acre to $60 and over,
in Iowa and other States in the East. The land utility is the same as
in years gone by. It will raise no more—sometimes less than former
years. But every dollar added to the price has increased the rental, and
decreased the possibilities of a laboring man becoming owner of his own
farm.
Someone will say that this is untrue; that the returns from an acre of
land are today greater than in former years. What I mean is that an acre
of land cropped for ten or fifteen or twenty years is no more valuable
today as a producer of grain or live stock than it was then. The added
value of the crop is due to better markets, better implements, better
knowledge of agriculture. In other words it is a net gain due to labor
and intelligence, and as such should go to labor. Instead of that it is
consumed in rent. With every advance in the values of Western lands and
the consequent narrowing of the opportunities afforded the landless man
of the Eastern and Central States, the values, or rather the prices, of
these older lands advance.
And if the speculator is able at this time to force the price of land up
by leaps and bounds—if he can take raw prairie and, without adding to
its value by so much as one furrow of breaking or one bushel of ripened
grain, can make it double his money for him, how will it be when the last
of the tillable public lands are taken? How will it be when the only
desirable vacant lands are held for speculative purposes? How will it be
when there is no alternative between paying some farmer for a part of his
holding or paying some land company its price, based upon monopolistic
values?
Today, in the West, favored by cheap land—$25 to $30 an acre—I am giving
$1.30 as rental for every $1.00 I receive as tenant. Here it still is
possible for a man to start single handed and win a farm, but the crops
remain about the same, the prices are slowly bettering, the cost of the
bare necessities of living is lowering, the price of land is rapidly
advancing, the rental is going up, and my wages as a tenant are becoming
relatively less. I can still say, “Unless you give me a living chance, I
will go to the free lands and make my own home.” I still can pay for a
home for myself here. But I know that a decade hence conditions will have
changed. There will be no ‘farther West’ in the sense in which we know it
today. The increased land values will shut out a great body of men from
becoming land owners, or they will achieve their aim only at the expense
of a life-time of grinding toil. The basis of a landed aristocracy on
the one hand, and of a landless tenant class on the other will have been
laid. And you do not live so far to the Eastward, nor are you so deeply
buried in the great cities that the thrill of that new birth of despotism
shall not reach you, and be a portent of danger to your independence as a
citizen and as a man.
Repeal the land laws! Let the settlement of the public domain cease
until we know its capabilities. Better to deprive a few worthy men and
women of the advantage afforded by the laws than to throw away the
birthright of unborn millions. We do not know very much as yet about the
ability of the West to sustain population, but this we do know, that
no general land law can apply to this great semi-arid region and give
anything like equal justice. Investigate carefully the areas desired
for settlement. Make the unit of the homestead variable, according to
the amount needed to support a family. In irrigated sections but a few
acres will suffice. In even the drier districts it may well be questioned
whether more than 160 acres should be granted any one settler. We
cover altogether too much ground. Our Western farming has borne bitter
harvestings of the weed called “land hunger.” We need to concentrate.
And whatever laws may be enacted, they should be of such a character as
will stop speculation in lands intended for the people. Let the lands
be sold, and no title pass until after a reasonably long term of years,
and after actual continuous residence and actual valuable improvements
have shown beyond question that home making was the primary object of the
settler.
But the urgent present need is for repeal of the various laws that permit
this land plunder. We can settle details of future administration later
on. We cannot later on return to the people their stolen lands.
[Illustration]
_Candid_
Mrs. NEWROCKS—If there’s anything I hate it’s writing letters.
NEWROCKS—Do you?
Mrs. NEWROCKS—Yes, indeed. I wish somebody would invent an easy
substitute for spelling.
_Proof_
FIRST COMMUTER—This is a one-horse railroad, anyhow.
SECOND COMMUTER—Of course it is. Why, J. P. Morgan never tried to get
control of it.
[Illustration: THE TRIUMPH OF JUSTICE