Section One Mile Square in Every Tract Six Miles Square) to Be Reserved

for the common schools, another for the support of the ministry, and four whole townships, in the whole tract, for the maintenance of a university. Congress thought this too liberal, but finally, under the stress of need of revenue which the high-minded, reverend lobbyist, Reverend Menasseh Cutler, was prepared through his company to furnish, acceded, with a reduction only of the proposed appropriation to the university. The provision specifically was: "Lot number sixteen to be given perpetually by Congress to the maintenance of schools, and lot number twenty-nine to the purpose of religion in the said townships; two townships near the center and of good land to be also given by Congress for the support of a literary institution, to be applied to the intended object by the legislature of the State."

A second great tract was sold the same year under similar conditions. This was the last occasion on which provision for the support of religion was made by the national Congress, and what came of this particular grant I have not followed beyond the statement below. [Footnote: In 1828 Ohio petitioned for permission to sell the lands reserved for religious purposes, and in 1833 this was granted. The proceeds of the sales were to be invested and used for the support of religion, under the direction of the legislature within the townships in which the reserves were located.-- Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]

But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans- Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a million acres.

A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England, where colonies, in grants to companies or townships, made specific stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry and where townships voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them perishing, schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational movement of the time.

In the Mississippi Valley, then, or the greater part of it--whatever the historical origin of the provisions may be-from one-thirty-sixth to one- eighteenth of the public land has been set apart to the education of generation after generation till the end of the republic--or as Americans would be disposed to put it in synonymous phrase, "till the end of time."

Acres vary in size, one of our eminent horticulturists has reminded us, measured in terms of productivity. And the gifts to the various townships have been by no means of the same size, measured in terms of revenue for school purposes. "Number sixteen" may sometimes have fallen in shallow soil or on stony ground and "thirty-six" in swamp or alkali land. The lottery of nature is as hard-hearted as the lotteries of human devising; but the general provision has put an obligation upon the other thirty-five or thirty-four sections in every township that I suppose is seldom evaded. The child's acres are practically never, I suspect, less valuable than the richest and largest of those in the township about it, for the reason that the difference is made good by the local taxpayer. The child's acre is, as a rule, then, as large as the largest, the most productive acre. And roughly there are fifty thousand of those little plots in that domain-- fifty thousand sections a mile square, thirty-two million acres reserved from the beginning of time, theoretically at least, to the end of time. As a matter of fact, they are not to be distinguished objectively from other acres now; they are to be distinguished only subjectively, that is, as one thinks of what is grown year by year in the schools, to which their proceeds, if not their products, are given.

I quoted above an estimate made in 1803 of what might have been done with the fifteen million dollars, paid to the French for Louisiana. One alternative suggested was the permanent endowment of eighteen hundred free schools, allowing five hundred dollars a year per school and accommodating ninety thousand pupils. The public-school allotment for that part of the valley alone is fifteen million acres. Even at two dollars an acre (a very low estimate), the endowment is twice the total amount paid for Louisiana --and I am estimating this school acreage at but one thirty-sixth instead of one-eighteenth of the total acreage. Therefore, France may, in a sense, be said to have given these acres to the support of the "children of always"--since these plots alone have probably yielded many times the purchase price of the entire territory.

To be sure, these white plots, as I would have them marked on a map of the valley, have in many States been sold and occupied as the other plots, with only this distinction, that the proceeds are inviolably set apart to this sacred use, as certain parts of animals were, under Mosaic law, reserved for public sacrifice. In one trans-Mississippi State, Iowa, for example, of a total grant of 1,013,614.21 acres [Footnote: Iowa, 1,013,614.21 acres from section 16 and 535,473.76 acres by congressional grant in 1841.] (less what the boundary rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had carried away in their voracious encroachments, and plus what other natural agents had added), only 200 acres remained unsold in 1911.

As we view the policy from the year 1903 and from the midst of a populous valley, in which land values have risen from one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre to a hundred or two hundred dollars in most fertile farm tracts, and to thousands in urban centres, we can but regret that these lands themselves had not been held inviolate, and can but wish that only their rentals had been devoted to the high uses to which the nation and State had consecrated these lands. This policy would have put in the heart of every township a common field whose rental would have grown with the development of the country. It would have furnished fruitful data for comparison between two systems of land tenure. And it would have kept ever visibly, tangibly before the people their heritage and their obligation. As it is, one has to use the greatest imagination in translating the figures in a State treasurer's or county supervisor's report, back into the little plots that gathered into the soil of their acres the noblest purposes that ever animated a nation--these spots where one generation made its unselfish prayer and sacrifice for the next.

That the purpose still exists, despite the passing of the tangible symbol, and that the prayer is still made in every township of that territory, where even a few children live, is evidenced by the fact that every two miles north and south, east and west of settled region there stands a schoolhouse. I shall speak later of this wide-spread provision, not only for universal elementary education but also for secondary and higher education, ordained of the people and for the people, to be paid for by the people out of their common treasury. But attention must here be called, in passing, to the fact that the parcelling of the domain of Louis XIV in the new world fixed irrevocably the public school in the national consciousness and purpose and made it the foundation of a purely democratic social system and the nourisher of a more highly efficient democratic political system.

On the Atlantic side of the mountains there was bitter controversy between those who held that education was necessary for the preservation of free institutions and those who held that free education increased taxation unduly; between those who desired and those who regretted the breaking down of social barriers which both claimed would ensue as a result of such education; between those who regarded education as a natural right and those who considered taxation for such a purpose a violation of the rights of the individual; between those who saw in it a panacea for poverty and distress and those who urged that it would not benefit the masses; and, finally, between those of one sect and race and those of another. But in the trans-Alleghany country north of the Ohio, and in all the territory west of the Mississippi (practically coterminous, let me again remind you, with that region where the French were pioneers within the present bounds of the United States) there was practically no dissension, though the provision was meagre at the start. The public school had no more of the atmosphere or character of a charity, a "pauper" school than the highway provided for out of the same grant, where rich and poor met in absolute equality of right and opportunity. It became the pride of a people, the expression of the people's ideal, the corner-stone of the people's hope. I suppose that three-fourths of the children of the territory whose ranges have been surveyed by the magic chains forged of this first great parcelling ordinance have had the tuition of the public schools--future Presidents of the United States, justices, railroad and university presidents, farmers, artisans, artists, and poets alike.

So while it was desire for revenue that prompted the early sales of the public domain in the Mississippi Valley, the nation got in return not only means to help pay its Revolution debt, but, incidentally, settlements of highly individualistic, self-dependent, and interdependent pioneers, gathered about one highly paternalistic or maternalistic institution--the public school. The credit for this has gone to New England and New York, but the "white acres" came of the territory and the riches of Nouvelle France.

You will not wish to follow in detail the ministrations of the priests of the land-offices and the surveys of the men of the magic chains, for it is a long and tedious story that would fill thousands of pages, and in the end only obscure the real significance of the movement. Here is a summary of allotments made up to 1904 of all the public domain, that of the Mississippi Valley being somewhat more than half. [Footnote: See Report of the Public Lands Commission, Washington, 1905.]

Private land claims, donations etc. (the first of the latter being made to the early French settlers).............................................(ACRES) 33,400,000

Wagon-road, canal, and river improvement grants (provision for the narrow strips of common that intersect each other at every mile of the settled parts of the valley).................................. 9,700,000

Railroad grants for the subsidizing of the private building of railways chiefly up and down and across the valley.............................. 117,600,000

Swamp-land grants (being tracts of wet or overflowed lands given to the various States for reclamation)............................................. 65,700,000

School grants to States (those which we have been considering)....................................... 69,000,000

Other grants to States (largely for educational purposes)........................................ 20,600,000

Military and naval land warrants........................... 61,000,000

Scrip issued for various purposes (chiefly in view of service to the government)......................... 9,300,000

Allotment to individual Indians............................ 15,100,000

Mineral lands (under special entries)....................... 1,700,000

Homestead entries (that is, by settlers taking claims under homestead acts of which I shall speak later)........................................... 96,500,000

Timber-culture entries (final).............................. 9,700,000

Timber and stone entries.................................... 7,600,000

Cash entries, including entries under the preemption and other acts................................... 276,600,000

Reservoir rights of way....................................... 300,000

Forest reserves (tracts of forest land permanently reserved from sale).............................. 57,900,000

For national reclaiming purposes............................. 39,911,000

Reserved for public purposes (public buildings, forts, etc.).................................................. 6,700,000

Indian reservations........................................ 73,000,000

Entries pending............................................ 39,500,000

Unappropriated public land................................ 841,872,377

Total (including Alaska)................................ 1,852,683,377

By June 30, 1912, homestead entries had increased to 127,800,000 acres; timber and stone entries to 13,060,000 acres; forest reserves to 187,400,000 acres, and there was left 682,984,762 acres, more than half of which was in Alaska; that is, of the billion and a half of acres, exclusive of Alaska, over a billion have been sold to private uses, granted in aid of private enterprises, used for public improvements, appropriated forever to public uses, or given to the support of education.

The controlling motive at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation, seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the passing of the world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural right to the land without disturbing the system in force in older settled communities, the people strove to effect the subordination of revenue to the social good of the frontier and the country at large. By the middle of the century this many-motived feeling had expression in a party platform; that "the public lands-belong to the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil Democratic Platform, 1892, p. 12.]

It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who in season and out kept asserting the equal right of man to land. It was as a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already congested areas on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making the wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his associates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social regeneration that would not disturb the titles to property already granted to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less, for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he thought. [Footnote: See J. R. Commons, "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," VII:287-349.]

A German economist has expressed the view that it was only this movement, so inaugurated, that prevented America from going into socialism. One of our foremost economists in America, in discussing this very subject, begins with these observations:

"The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting with the theory of the rights of man, they build up a logical system, then a revolution, and the theory goes into practice. Next a coup d'état and an emperor.

"The English are a nation without too much philosophy or logic. They piece out their constitution at the spot where it becomes tight.... They are practical ... unlogical.

"The Americans are French in their logic and English in their use of logic. They announce the universal rights of man and then enact into law enough to augment the rights of property."

The homestead law owed its origin to the doctrine of natural rights, whose transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were gathered under the banner of its idealism, till finally it came to be an ensign not only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for the slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end to slavery, even if within a half century it has exhausted in its generosity the nation's domain of arable land. The voice in the wilderness cried for a legalized natural right that would not disturb vested rights, for an individualism based on private property given without cost, for equality by a limitation of that property to one hundred and sixty acres, and finally for the inalienability from sale or mortgage of that little plot of earth. Thirty years later the natural right to unoccupied land was recognized, individualistic society was strengthened by the great increase in the number of property holders, and inalienability was recognized by the States; but the failure to reserve the free lands to such actual settlers alone and to limit the amount of the holding left the way open for railroad grants, which alone have in two generations exceeded the homestead entries, and for the amassing of great stretches by a few.

The logic of France, speaking through the voice of that leader and other men such as Horace Greeley, led the later exodus as certainly as her pioneers opened the way for the first American settlers. And though the logic was applied in English fashion, yet it had a notable part in making, as I have just said, the free soil of the Mississippi Valley contribute to the freeing of a whole people in slavery, inside and outside of the valley. That logic learned in France would doubtless have accomplished a conclusion needing less patching and opportunistic repair if the immediate interests of those of the frontiers, those who wanted immediate settlement and development, had not disturbed one of the premises. At any rate, a great and perhaps the last opportunity to carry such doctrines to their conclusions without overturning all social and industrial institutions has gone by. A half-billion acres of inalienable farms, all of the same size, trespassing upon no ancient rights, interspersed with the white blocks held for the education of the children of that free soil, might have furnished an example for all time to be followed or shunned-if, indeed, all acres had been born of the primeval sea and glaciers not only free but equal in size. As it was, some acres were born large and some small, some fruitful and some barren, some with gold in their mouths and some with only the taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have adjusted them to the unequal capacities of that army of land lackers who declared themselves free and equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to the territory where the squatters became sovereigns and homesteads became castles.

President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven- hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30- per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen billion six hundred million dollars--a scheme as ingenious, says one, as Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting hen." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to encourage agriculture, July 25, 1850. Speeches on the homestead bill, April 29, 1852, and May 20, 1858.]

There are approximately nine million homes (or homes, tenements, and flats) in that domain to-day, and it is quite easily demonstrable that they not only contribute to the support of government, directly and indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic estimates of Andrew Johnson suggested but also give to the world a surplus of product undreamed of even in 1850. It is hardly likely that any system of parcelling would have more rapidly developed this vast domain. There is a question as to whether some more logical, conserving, long-viewed policy might not have been devised for the "common good" of the generations that are yet to occupy that valley with the generation that is there and the three or four generations that have already gone. It is that "common good" that is now engaging the thought of our foremost economists, natural scientists, and public men. Of that I shall speak later.

Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV, but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find dwelling there.