Is it just and proper to require the landgrant railroads to transport your mails at 50 per cent of the rates you pay to corporations whose railroads were built by private capital? I think it is. I think it liberal and more than liberal when the cost in public wealth is considered in the building of these land-grant railroads. I submit tables of the railroads built under the land-grant system, compiled from official reports, and they show an aggregate of 218,386,199 acres, 192,081,155 acres of which were granted between June 30, 1862, and March 4, 1875, the aggregate length of railroads for which the grants were made being 20,803 miles, 13,071 miles independent of the 7,732 mileage of the Pacific roads; and the reports of the Post-office Department show that last year the Government paid, on 11,588,56 miles of land-grant railroad, independent of the Union Pacific system and the great body of lapsed grants, $1,144,323.91 for postal service. The startling fact appears that in the gradual development of these grants, great as they are, they still swell in their proportions. I pointed out on a former occasion the startling discrepancies that appear in the official statements of these grants, and can only say now, as I did then, that in such enormous grants a few million acres either way is considered of no moment.
Again:
There are other grants which I have not included in either of the foregoing tables where not a spadeful of earth has been dug in the construction of a railroad, yet the lands are withdrawn from settlement and claimed by the corporation, although the grants were long since forfeited. The forfeiture of these grants will, of course, be declared. Of all of these grants over 109,000,000 acres, including over 16,000,000 this House has already declared forfeited, are beyond any reasonable question forfeited, and the declaration of that forfeiture by Congress is demanded by the highest consideration of public policy, common honesty, and justice to the people. Even to the extent these land-grant railroads enumerated in the first table were completed, you paid them, as I have shown, last year $1,144,323.91 for transporting your mails. This bill would, as to these roads, to the extent they are entitled to the lands granted and including the Pacific systems, save to the Treasury annually, I think, near a million dollars, perhaps more.
Deducing from the foregoing statement of land-grants to corporations, Mr. Holman draws the following picture of what the people may do when they are fully informed and aroused to the enormous extent to which they have been despoiled by their unfaithful servants in congress:
The wealth that builds palaces, undermines the foundations of free Government, and wrings from the heart of labor the cry of despair! With the public lands exhausted, with remnants of the Indian-tribes despoiled of their reservations, and the lands seized upon by capitalists and merciless speculators (except so far as you have pledged them in advance to the railroad corporations), and lands everywhere advanced in price beyond the reach of laboring men, with the hope of better fortune and of independent homes dying out of the heart of labor, with men fully conscious of the wrong you have done them by your legislation, can the peaceful order of society be hoped for as of old? I am not astonished that gentlemen deem this early hour an opportune moment to urge the policy of a great navy; it will come, if it does come, in the natural order before a great army. Capital is timid and full of suggestions; the Navy is the most remote, but I am not surprised that here and there comes also the intimation that your Army is too small. These, too, may be some of the bitter fruits of your imperial grants. I fear that it will be seen soon enough that when you have destroyed the very foundations of security and hope upon which labor has rested so long, the old-time repose and peaceful order will be no more. Gentlemen should not forget that the wrong that has been done to laboring men and their children by giving over their natural inheritance to an accursed monopoly will in due time be considered by the most intelligent body of laboring men who ever debated a public wrong—men fully aware of their rights and capable of asserting them.
But the foreign land-shark, and the corporate land-shark, dwindle into insignificance by the side of the individual land-shark. Every hamlet, town, city, and state in the Union is in the grasp of the individual land holder. Starting with his fellows as a pioneer two hundred and fifty years ago, with his pickaxe on his shoulder, he has steadily grown in size and importance, so that today he holds in his hands the destinies of the Republic and the life of his fellow citizens. His bulk has become mastodonian in proportions and his influence has shrivelled up the energies of the people. More absolute than the Iron Prince of Germany, he pays no taxes; he limits production, not to the requirements of the population but to the demand of the market, at such figures as he can extort from the crying necessities of the people through the operations of "corners;" he regulates the wheels of government, State and Federal, and dictates to the people by making them hungry and naked.
We stand only upon the threshold of governmental existence; the nation, in comparison to the hoary-handed commonwealths of Europe, was born but yesterday; but, having adopted at the beginning the system which hastened the downfall of Rome after she had spread her authority over the known world, we are already weak and exhausted. Monopoly has stunted the people, and they stagger to the grave, starved to death by a system of robbery almost too transparent to require minute elucidation at the hand of the conscientious writer upon economic questions. The suppressed groans of the toiling masses are echoed and reëchoed from every corner of the land, and burst forth in mobocratic fury that the entire police authority finds it almost impossible to stay. The newspapers are a daily chronicle of the desperate condition to which the country has been brought by the rapacity and ignorance of legislators and the parasitical manipulations of the gang which has rooted itself in the soil of the country.
The fires of revolution are incorporated into the Magna Charta of our liberties, and no human power can avert the awful eruption which will eventually burst upon us as Mount Vesuvius burst forth upon Herculaneum and Pompeii. It is too late for America to be wise in time. "The die is cast."