Confiscation; An Outline

by William Greenwood

Give us all the conveniences of modern life, railroads, telegraphs, etc., etc., etc., but give us back the land, that is our natural heritage as much as is the water we drink or the air we breath.

Give us back this birthright, or take your railroads, and so on, and your civilization, and sink them deep in the depths of hell, for the starving have no use for them, and we'll take the savage state that knows no hunger except in the time of famine.

X.

Limit the ownership of land, be it arable, grazing, timber, or any other kind, to 160 acres. As no one shall own more than $100,000 worth of property all told, this 160 acres will have to be reduced as we get near to the centres of population. This will still give the owner of such convenient land an advantage over those living further out, who will always be willing to exchange should the first rather follow the coarser grades of farming to dairying or gardening.

Neither is there any reason why the owning of great sections of timber land by one or two men should be necessary to the running of sawmills and supplying the people with lumber. The mills are capable of doing just as good work if the fifty quarter sections are owned by fifty men as they are if owned by one man. And the waste of timber seen on every hand wherever you find a mill owned and operated by capitalists would have been unknown if there had been an individual owner to each quarter section. The wanton waste of this breed of the capitalist, in his hurry to pile up, would have been impossible had his mill been a "custom" mill, to saw the timber from your quarter section and mine instead of his fifty or five hundred. And the poor unskilled laborer would not have to go to make room for the chinaman, or that member of a worthless tribe who sold his "claim" to the "company" for so much and the promise of a job. The small owner cannot afford the waste of the large one. His income will not be so great that he can afford to waste the principal from which it comes. As to any friction about whose turn it is to run his timber through, it is only necessary to say that the business will be then carried on by those who are now doing the labor, and it will be no worse to accept wages from the man on the neighboring claim for helping him to make lumber than it was to accept wages from the man who was dethroned, and he will probably pay you as much as you could make running your own logs through.

If this is not satisfactory, sell out at once to one of the many that are waiting to buy, and go, for you will not find anything in what we are advocating that interferes in the least with the liberty of the individual. Some may think differently, but then they are the ones who brought all eyes to the window to see what was going on in the street.

And as you travel on you will miss the once eager dog at the farm house by the way, and no palsied hand will be lifting the corner of the curtain as you are passing by, for the tramp has disappeared, and the rare survivor and incurable will be doing it on bread and water, for he must be a useless thing not to have drawn his last breath with his compatriot at the other end of the scale.

The farmer who has children that are not of age when the new arrangement goes into force will see great hardship in the 160-acre law. He intended to give this piece of land to one son and that piece to another, and so on. He would give each of these sons more, but some one else owns the rest of the country thereabouts, and these, say, 160-acre tracts, are the best he can do. Leaving out of the question whether his sons can locate alongside of himself or not, and confining ourselves to their chance of being able to get 160 acres, which is the vital point in the whole matter, he must see that, if he must surrender his excess and all others must do the same, there would be more land to take up than there are people to take it. We are in a Republic, Mr. Farmer, and the interest of the many who have called at your door call on you to disgorge with the rest.

When we come to the land in the mountains we find that it averages poor, yet the 160-acre law must be applied there also. To allow more would be to give an opening to the smart one, who would take advantage as he has always done; and as the country is pretty well tired of him we will save future complications by tying him down to 160 acres like the rest. The mountain farmer or rancher, with rare exceptions, gets his income from the raising of pork or beef animals, which are rarely confined to the owner's premises, but are allowed to roam and graze where they will, at times as far as forty and fifty miles away from where they belong. And as the mountaineer makes little if any provisions for the barn feeding of his animals, outside of one or two milk cows and his few work animals, and these last only through the work season and the bad weather of whatever winter the locality may have, he will not find his business of raising meat for the market curtailed in any respect. Should he need more hay or grain ground, or ground for orchards or gardens, be will always find it inside of his 160-acre inclosure, for there are none yet among them who knows the possibilities of a 160-acre ranch under the plow. And as none has yet been forced to put the plow into outside ground, it can be taken for granted that they never will.

Where, then, is the reason why this class of farmers should be allowed title to more land than the others? The range or grazing ground among the hills and along the water courses will still be open to their animals, and instead of the proposed change injuring their business, it will, in these days of cheap barb-wire, stop the would-be cattle king and speculative grabber from crippling or destroying it altogether, a fate not unknown to some who have tried in a small way to make a living from cattle raising.