I would not dare to make such serious charges if I did not speak from absolute experience (applause). When I reached Oregon I found that situation existing in Oregon—indeed, I found on investigation before a grand jury that the then United States attorney was protecting certain men, who belonged to the higher-up class, from indictment, and that he had entered into a corrupt conspiracy with both the United States Senators from that State, by which they had agreed to have him reappointed United States attorney upon condition that these men should not be prosecuted (applause). Moreover, I found that when the first stealing of timber commenced in Oregon and men were arrested for it, a man representing a big and influential timber company had taken to the railroad train about twenty-five men at Portland and carried them up to Salem and had them file openly on contiguous timber claims, each one swearing falsely that he was taking the timber for his own use; and when the matter was exposed immediately and the United States attorney took the matter before a grand jury and indicted the leaders who had instigated those men to go up and make the filings, influential State officials appealed to the United States Senators from Oregon to interfere, and appeals were sent to the Commissioner of the General Land Office and the Secretary of the Interior, so that finally the indictments were dismissed. Shortly thereafter about one hundred men filed on timber claims, under a contract to turn them over as soon as they were acquired, and again the influence of politicians and big business men brought about a failure of justice through an assistant United States attorney, who was the brother of the attorney representing the big interests who had hired these men to make the filings. Case after case of that kind came to my knowledge in Oregon; case after case of that kind has been brought to my attention in four or five other States. All of it can be traced back to the system under which we have been electing our United States Senators. (Applause)
Professor Hadley has well said that the fundamental divisions of power in the Constitution of the United States are between the voters on the one hand and the property owners on the other. That is the fight. That always has been the fight. That always will be the fight in this country. You heard, probably, all of you, that great address by the greatest citizen of the world, made in this hall the other day (applause), in which he outlined those conditions.
Now let us come back, for I want to show you wherein our trouble lies; and I want to show that great genius in railroad building (who is a citizen of your State, and who talked to you yesterday afternoon)—I want to show you and him who is responsible for the "extravagance and waste" of the great natural resources of this country. (Applause)
I have pointed out to you how big business controlled the execution of the laws in practically every place in the West—except, of course, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota; in the early days when there was timber here none of these evils existed because these conditions didn't exist; your timber lands were not stolen in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan; you didn't have United States attorneys suggested by United States Senators who had been selected by owners of large timber tracts or railroads. Some States in the Union have suffered from that, but you never had any such thing come home to you (laughter). I congratulate you (renewed laughter). The Nation has had in its possession, owned in common by all of us and our forefathers, 1,800,000,000 acres of land. That is some property (laughter); that is more than either you or I possess today (laughter). And that included all of the present Rockefeller oil possessions, it included all of the Northern Pacific's land-grant possessions, it included all of the great anthracite companies' coal possessions, it comprised all of the millions of acres of timber land throughout the United States, including what there was in Minnesota. It belonged to you and me and our fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers. We were pretty rich at that time. We could have held on to it and developed it, because I can't believe that if we had offered to pay a patriotic citizen like James J. Hill the sum of $50,000 a year to build a railroad for us from Lake Superior to Puget Sound and to furnish him the money with which to build it, that he would have refused the job (applause); even had he considered it inadequate compensation for his great ability, his patriotic love of the people of the United States would have led him to do it. (Great applause and cheers) In talking with a banker the other night—one of the Big Four of New York—I asked him if in his opinion Mr Harriman, in the gigantic operations performed by him, was influenced by love of money and the desire to gain filthy lucre, or whether he was influenced by the great gratification of achievement, and he said undoubtedly by the latter; that Mr Harriman would have combined all these railroads for the people of the United States on a salary of $50 a month, if we didn't want to give him any more, just for the pleasure of doing it. (Laughter and applause) But we have received misinformation, and are receiving it yet, to the effect that there are no patriots in the United States; that no man is willing to develop our coal or our oil or our iron or our water-power or anything else that is left unless we give him everything in sight. (Laughter and applause)
My friends, the way the people of the United States have been treated in regard to this vast property which we owned reminds me of a story I heard about a man down South—a white man. He was going along the river in flood time in the back country, and the river was full of floating logs and refuse and all sorts of timber, and he saw a nigger sitting on the bank—and will you pardon me for using the word "nigger" instead of "colored man," because I have just been making a visit down in Virginia and I suppose I fell into it (laughter); it is not meant as a term of reproach, nor is it used as such there or here—and seeing this negro sitting on the bank, he said to him, "Sam, what are you doing?" "Nothin', Suh." "Whose boat is that?" "That's mine, Suh." "Well, Sam, let me tell you what I'll do; you take your boat and go and haul those logs out of the river there, and I'll give you half of all you get on shore." (Laughter)
It took a little while for that to sink in (laughter). It has taken you forty years to let this railroad proposition sink in. (Laughter)
Right while I am on it, while it is fresh in my mind and in yours: Mr Hill says, "We have been extravagant." Why, my friends, do you know what we gave to Mr Hill? I say we "gave" it; as a matter of fact, we weren't consulted (laughter); we didn't have a referendum on it (laughter and great applause). We gave the greatest land-grant ever given to an individual or a corporation in the history of the world—sixty millions of acres; when I say to Mr Hill, of course I mean the Northern Pacific. We gave outright a strip of land 2000 miles long, 20 miles wide in the States and 40 miles wide in the Territories! Worse than that: instead of giving it in a solid body, we gave every even section, so that in timber lands it carried an immense advantage over anybody else coming in from the outside. Now, it is easy to demonstrate, and I hardly believe Mr Hill would care to deny it—and if he does, I'll get the figures and demonstrate it (applause)—that this land-grant was worth, at a fair figure, ten dollars an acre at the very least. That is six hundred million dollars (applause) of our property that we "extravagantly and improvidently wasted," as Mr Hill would call it; and I agree with him. (Laughter and applause)
But what does that mean? Why, the road is 2000 miles long; $50,000 a mile on an average for the entire road is a very fair figure as the cost of it, making, if I calculate correctly, $100,000,000, to build it. Let's double that, and allow $100,000 a mile for the 2000 miles; that certainly would build and equip the road. That is two hundred million dollars. And we gave six hundred million dollars worth of land, and the railroad was built and now wants forever to charge you rates—upon how much of a capitalization? Well, I don't know. But four hundred million dollars profit! Why, that would more than build the Panama Canal—and I wonder that some private corporation didn't do that (laughter). It would, undoubtedly, if we had been willing to give to it all of the remaining 700,000,000 acres of land that we have left—including Alaska, with the coal mines that Guggenheim wants (laughter and applause). We have been "improvident"—or somebody has—with the property of the people.
Now, who was so improvident? Why, Congress; because the Constitution places in the hands of Congress the power to dispose of, regulate, and control the property of the United States; and Congress did it—and did us, too (laughter and applause). But not satisfied with that, Congress gave to the Southern Pacific, the Central Pacific, and the Union Pacific 120,000,000 acres more of our inheritance, which we purchased with both blood and money—because the war with Mexico led to a part of the purchase, in which thousands of American citizens were killed, and thousands of American women widowed, and thousands of American children orphaned, while we put fifteen millions of our money—our common pot—into the purchase on top of that human blood; and then we "extravagantly and improvidently" gave it away. (Applause)
Not satisfied with that, when we commenced to realize that it was necessary to save the forests of this country—some of the forests which were left—Congress again passed an act, in 1907, called the New Land Act. In 1891 it had passed the law authorizing the President to create National forest reserves. At the same time it had passed a law authorizing the States to select new lands for the school sections which might be included in the National forest reserves. A gentleman in California by the name of Frederick A. Hyde, and another gentleman (who is since dead, and who served a year in jail, just before his death, for defrauding the United States), were actively operating in the State of California in school lands. Now, don't get the idea in your heads from what I have been saying about the way Congress has handled the lands and property of the United States that I am in favor of turning over to the States the power to handle any property in the hope that it will be better handled, because there, again, my experience teaches me that it will be worse—if possible (laughter and applause). Well, under that law of 1891, Hyde and his companion adopted this system: Where they found that school lands were in reserve (they had a man in the Surveyor-General's office who was looking out for them), they would go down and get bootblacks, and saloon barkeepers, and Tom, Dick, and Harry to sign an application for school lands—under the law of California 320 acres—the law requiring that in making his filing the applicant should swear that he was taking it for his own use and benefit and not for speculative purposes. And at the same time that Mr Bootblack signed the application, he would sign a transfer of his interest, a conveyance of the land, with the date left blank; and a very agreeable notary public would put his seal and acknowledgment upon the affidavit and the assignment, despite the blanks and the absence even of any description of the lands in the application. Then, when Mr Hyde had one or two hundred of these, he would go and take up all those school lands, and have the agent of the State thereupon locate all of these school lands in a body in the finest forest he could find in California—some of the finest that ever grew on earth are there, trees two and three hundred feet high, sixteen to twenty feet in diameter, cutting so many millions of feet to the quarter-section that it would astound even a Minnesota lumberman unless he had been out there and seen it; and those magnificent virgin forests would be separated from public ownership by our "extravagance"—and this, mark you, through Congress passing the 1891 law for the benefit (?) of the schools of the State so loosely drawn that speculators could take advantage of it in this way. So the virgin forests went into private ownership; and Mr Hill will tell you, "What of it? Doesn't that develop the country?"