(To be continued.)
OUR PUBLIC LAND SYSTEM and ITS
RELATION To EDUCATION IN
THE UNITED STATES.
Local historians seem inclined to overlook some of the most interesting subjects included under the general term of history. One of these is the origin of land titles. I do not propose in this article, limited as to space, to do more than indicate by slight touches the growth of land titles on the earth, and the steps by which we as a nation became endowed with the ownership of land in parcels large or small. Further, the object of this brief review is to fix in the mind of the student of history, and especially of Oregon history, the connection between land and educational privileges in his state.
By way of introduction I would put forth the proposition, by no means original, that God-made things are eternal, and belong to the children of men equally and forever. Such is man himself. There can be no human ownership of men except that of brotherhood. The dominion of man over all other life is for his use only. He cannot claim collective ownership of any particular genus or species, but only individual ownership by conquest. Of the great divisions of inanimate nature, earth, air, and water, individual man cannot own more than he uses, because they belong equally to all men, and to all living things. For the needs of these they were created, without preference for races or single representatives of races.
Men in their primordial condition blindly recognized this principle as to the earth, and for thousands of years did not become owners of land in severalty. Divided into tribes they contended with each other for the possession of certain countries because they were born there, or because it held the graves of their fathers. To "sleep with their fathers," or to continue to breathe the air which had borne abroad over the land the sacred ashes of their ancestors was with them a religion. The same earth furnished pasturage for the animals upon whose milk and flesh they subsisted, and nourished the fruits they found most agreeable. Hence they contended for its use against the covetousness of other tribes. The long and persistent war carried on by the descendants of Abraham to regain the land which held his burial place is an example of the ancient sentiment of ownership in land, a sentiment which we honor most highly under the name of patriotism. Metes and bounds could not be closely observed in a pastoral country, neither could they in a wooded one where game furnished the chief subsistence of the inhabitants. Everything depended upon the strength and valor of the predatory and the resisting tribes, and the division of lands acquired in war was settled, as in this world most things still are settled, by the most active securing to themselves the most desirable places.
The common desire to save from invasion the country of their birth, and the necessity of captains in war, led to chieftainship, and chieftainship led to the accumulation of such wealth as the conquered lands afforded, whether in flocks and herds, in other subsistence, or in such personal property as the subjugated nation possessed. War makes a people nomadic in their habits. The young and the strong were trained to fight, the feebler remained in such homes as they were able to maintain in a state of continual dread of the enemy. The cultivation of the ground at this stage of civilization was as uncertain as it was unscientific. To the majority the land could have only a sentimental value; to the higher classes it was a source of income through the enforced labor of the enslaved class by whose toil they were enabled to pay their military taxes to petty Kings.
Continental Europe was at this stage of development centuries after the Christian era, and England long after the crusades. It was in the eleventh century that the Norman conqueror, William, having fixed himself upon the English throne, in order to secure the military tax in its entirety, caused the lands held by the feudal lords to be surveyed, and a description of them recorded in his Domesday Book. Hitherto lands were held under grants from barons or lords; but the Conqueror claimed that, as the representative of the people, he, and he only, could give a legal title to land, thus indirectly recognizing its ownership by the people. Under William, all land owners, great and small, were known as "the King's men," a policy which made the feudal lords his supporters. In return for their support he gave them offices. An office presupposed property, and property insured office. The first social effect of this was to lower men hitherto free, although in time it tended to raise the condition of the slave class to that of freemen by removing the distinction between these two classes. But it left a peasantry attached to the soil with no voice in its disposal. A law of primogeniture prevented the division of the great estates conferred upon "the King's men," who could neither sell nor give away their landed property.
How much of the colonizing spirit of Englishmen is due to this exclusive occupation of England by a class, we might very naturally inquire. But that is aside from the subject under consideration. It was my intention to point out that the land system of the United States is directly descended from the practice of William the Conqueror, whose policy of binding the most active and influential men of the Kingdom to his throne by gifts of land was imitated by his successors down to the period when English subjects began to colonize America.[1]