But we have failed to profit by the example of England. Our legislators have been blind to the lessons of history, or they have been corrupt. They have been ignorant of political and social laws, or they have been wanting in rectitude. In the period of thirty years, ended in 1880, Congress gave to railway corporations over 240,000 square miles, or 154,067,553 acres, of the best public lands in the States and Territories of the Union—an area double that of the whole kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, including the adjacent isles.
On the 17th of March, 1883, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a history of these land grants, compiled by Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, under the following summary:
“The story of the dissipation of our great national inheritance—thrown away by Congress, wasted by the Land Office, stolen by thieves. A land monopoly worse than that of England, begotten in America. English monopoly is in families; American monopoly is in corporations; and corporations are the only aristocrats that have no souls, and never die.”
The following passages from the opening paragraphs of Mr. Lloyd’s history are reproduced here by permission of the author:
“The public are profoundly ignorant of the facts about the public land. They know, in a dim way, that it is passing out of their hands, and that huge monopolies are being created out of the lands which they meant should be the inheritance of the settler. The land set apart for homes for families has been made into empires for corporations. In the story recited below, every element of human fault and fraud will be seen to have been at work in the spoliation of the land of the people. Congress has been extravagant and has failed to act when part of the results of its extravagance might have been saved. The Land Office has been inadequately equipped by Congress, and has on its own account been careless, dishonest, and traitorous to the interests of the people. It has been wax in the hands of the great railroad corporations, but double-edged steel in the side of the poor settler. It has overruled decisions of the Supreme Court and nullified acts of Congress to betray its trust and enrich the railroads, but has refused even to exercise its discretion when the home of a settler, held by a righteous title, was to be confiscated at the demand of corporate greed. The niggardliness of Congress makes clerks, on salaries of twelve hundred to eighteen hundred dollars a year, untrained in the law, knowing nothing of the rules of evidence, judges of the law and facts in cases involving millions of dollars and thousands of homes. There is no worse chapter in the history of government than the facts we have to give showing the deliberate and heartless evictions of the European immigrant and the American settler in order to give their farms to covetous corporations. The land-grant roads have had millions of acres granted them by the Land Office in excess of the grants by Congress. The whole story is summed up in the recent remark of one who had thoroughly investigated the subject—that the history of the management of the land-grant roads by the Land Office is a history of the management of the Land Office by the railroads.
“No chapter in this story will be found of more sombre interest than the statements made as to the Supreme Court by the Senate Committee on Public Lands, in a report submitted by Senator Van Wyck recommending a bill to compel the railroads to pay taxes on their lands. Its decisions as to the titles of the railroads and the settlers to the lands, like those of a weathercock, have pointed the way the corporation blew its breath.”
The summary of Mr. Lloyd’s paper by the editor of the Tribune, as a preface to its publication, and the foregoing characterization of the acts of Congress, of the Land Office, and of the Supreme Court, by Mr. Lloyd, are fully justified by the alleged facts marshalled in the body of the sketch; and these allegations, after a year and a half of public scrutiny, stand unchallenged.
It would be difficult to conceive of a more reckless series of legislative acts than those through which the public domain in the United States has been squandered; and they are rendered either ignorant or vicious by the fact that in the vast empire surrendered almost totally without consideration, each legislator, in common with the people by and for whom he was deputed to act, had a personal interest. Through this series of acts of Congress the public domain was rudely wrested from its rightful owners, the people; the abnormal growth of corporate power unduly promoted, and a tendency to the concentration, in a few hands, of the landed estates of the country fostered.
The social and economic effects of this land legislation must be very great and far-reaching. Of the effects of the concentration of landed estates in a few hands we need not speak; they are sufficiently plain in England, Scotland, and Ireland.[96] But great corporations are a creation of yesterday; they are the product of steam. The railway, the factory, the mine of iron or coal, the furnace, the foundery, and the forge—these vast interests, chartered and endowed with certain muniments of sovereignty, are, as property, almost as indestructible as landed estates protected by the law of primogeniture. Men are trained from generation to generation to the care and conduct of them, and hence they are far less liable to waste and dispersion than private estates, which, in transmission, may be subjected to disastrous changes of management. Being also enterprises of a semi-public character, the public is bound, as well as their owners, to see to their preservation.
[96] “The more essential and important consideration is this—that whenever the few rapidly accumulate excessive wealth, the many must, necessarily, become comparatively poorer.... In every case in which we have traced out the efficient causes of the present depression we have found it to originate in customs, laws, or modes of action which are ethically unsound, if not positively immoral. Wars and excessive war armaments, loans to despots or for war purposes, the accumulation of vast wealth by individuals, excessive speculation, adulteration of manufactured goods, and, lastly, our bad land system, with its insecurity of tenure, excessive rents, confiscation of tenants’ property, its common enclosures, evictions, and depopulation of the rural districts—all come under this category.”—“Bad Times,” pp. 65, 117. By Alfred Russel Wallace, LL.D. London: Macmillan & Co., 1885.