mortgage companies, who hold them out of use for a rise, or sell them in great tracts to large ranchers, or sell them on mortgage in small pieces to small users, expecting mortgage foreclosures sooner or later to bring them back, or else rent them out to tenants on shares. Land tenure in the United States had come to such a pass in 1900 that only thirty-one per cent. of the families owned homes or farms that were free and clear of all debt. Fifteen per cent. owned homes or farms that were encumbered, and more than half of the families-fifty-four per cent.-owned neither homes nor farms, but paid rent.1 Much of the land of the United States, especially the Western and Southern farming land, is held in large tracts. For instance, the Texas Land Syndicate No. 3 owns 3,000,000 acres in Texas, in which such English noblemen as the Duke of Rutland and Lord Beresford are largely interested. Another syndicate, the British Land Company, owns 300,000 acres in Kansas, besides tracts in other States. The Duke of Sutherland owns hundreds of thousands, and Sir Edward Reid controls 1,000,000 acres in Florida. A syndicate containing Lady Gordon and the Marquis of Dalhousie controls 2,000,000 acres in Mississippi. But these holdings become as nothing beside some of the stealings of the Western land thieves. The extent of their operations is almost beyond belief. Mr. William R. Lighton, of Omaha, Nebraska, who has made an exhaustive and careful examination of this matter, says, in a remarkable series of articles published in the Boston Transcript: Within the last fifteen years there has been stolen from the public domain not less than 150,000,000 acres; an area that would make thirty States of the size of Massachusetts, five States as large as New York, or three States as large as Kansas. When the truth is known, —as it may be by and by,— these figures will doubtless be doubled, 1 See "Free America," by Bolton Hall, p. 43. trebled or quadrupled. The present statement is one justified by present knowledge. (A recent grand jury investigation in California, backed up by other official inquiry, disclosed that one man alone in that State holds title to nearly 15,000,000 acres, acquired within the time named by the flagrant processes of theft. There are dozens, and even scores of men whose stealings will run from 10,000 to 1,000,000 acres or more, the extent of their grabs depending principally upon their ability to swing transactions to a successful issue. No reference is made to the solemn, semi-official chicanery of the railroad land grants or to the equally bald grants in the Southwest, glossing over earlier pilferings. Those deals appear by comparison impeccably honest and above reproach. This charge relates only to such downright, outright, deliberate stealing as cannot be described by any other name, bearing no stamp of formal official approval. Wherever there is a body of public land large enough to make a bait worth swallowing, there the thefts are going on. Lands of every description are included. Millions of acres in the rich wheat valleys of California have been stolen; millions of acres of grazing lands on the plains of Kansas, Nebraska, Dakota, Wyoming and Montana have been stolen; millions of acres of timber land in northern California, Oregon, Washington, Wyoming and Montana have been stolen, not to mention the earlier stealings in the now almost devastated timber regions of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota; and now the lumber thieves are plying their shameless trade unhindered in the new fields of Mississippi and other undeveloped districts of the South; unnumbered acres of mineral land have been stolen-in fact, nothing worth stealing has escaped the clutch of these bold outlaws.1 And then behold the railroad grants. To the generation now growing up, the prodigality of the grants out of the public domain to what are known as the "land grant railroads" is scarcely credible. Besides a continuous strip of land from one to four hundred feet wide for a right of way, with additional land for sidings, stations, yards and the like, the Federal Government granted all alternate sections, in a belt of land a number of miles in width running on each side of the right of way strip. The grant to the Southern Pacific, for instance, consisted of alternate sections of a belt of land 60 miles wide in California, and 2 1 These articles are seven in number, and bear date of May 20 and 27, June 3, 10, 17, and 24, and July 1, 1905. 2 A section is a square mile in United States land measurement. 100 miles wide in the Territories (some of them now States). The grant to the Northern Pacific consisted of alternate sections in a belt of land 120 miles wide, running from the western boundary of Minnesota to Puget Sound and the Columbia River.1 The total railroad land grants have amounted to approximately 200,000,000 acres, or 312,500 square miles. Can the significance of this be easily realized? This gift of public domain to our Western railroad companies was sufficient to have made 2,000,000 American farms of 100 acres each. It would have made more than 33,000,000 farms such as in Belgium support a family each in happy independence. Or consider the matter in another way. This land gift to the railroads is equal to the combined areas of the States of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and North Carolina. It is nearly as large as the territories of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France, taken together, which support a population of at least 75,000,000. This is the land ownership aspect of the railroad problem. It will grow more portentous as the years pass and multiplying population intensifies the demand for land. But what is of more pressing concern at present is the highway aspect of the railroads. This is a constant and increasing aggravation. A steam railroad is a steam public highway. In the beginning of railroad building in the United States it was so regarded. But the public rights were soon lost sight of under private possession. The 1 Besides land, the Federal, State, and municipal Governments made enormous grants of money and bonds for the stimulation of railroad building, mainly in the West. The five Pacific railroads (Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Atlantic and Pacific, Southern Pacific, and Texas Pacific) received enough in cash and bonds to build the roads and put large fortunes into the pockets of their managing promoters besides. These five roads received from the Federal Government alone United States bonds amounting to $64,000,000. policy of charging the general public "all that the traffic will bear," while secretly discriminating to build up monopolies among favored users, has made it a matter of profound and general wonder how, in the words of the distinguished jurist and railroad authority, Mr. Charles Francis Adams, "the business world sustains itself." Through high traffic charges and discriminating rates, railroad companies have become organizations for public plundering and monopoly breeding. Supreme Court Justice William J. Gaynor, of New York, in a recent address said: The greatest crime of our day and generation is the favoritism in freight rates on our public highways. I say crime, for more wrong has been done by it than by all the crimes defined by our statutes. It has crushed and beggared thousands all over the land. And I say public highways, because our railroads are our public highways. That the public highways of a country should be used to aggrandize some and destroy others is so infamous and so heartless that we will be looked back upon as a generation lost to moral sense for having allowed it so long. A brilliant English observer, the late Duke of Marlborough, fifteen years ago called our railroads "the very life and lungs of trade." He said that the main arteries of these railroad systems are now permanently worked out.1 "It will be practically impossible to make new routes, except at fabulous cost, with approaches to the coast. The strategical positions are seized and occupied, and whoever can possess himself to-day of a controlling interest in a main through route and allied feeders across the great central basin of the Northern States, cannot be deprived of a gigantic monopoly in the present and in the future." Facing these facts, observe the extent to which the railroads have combined and railroad management has concentrated. Mr. Charles A. Prouty, of the Inter-State 1 Fortnightly Review, April, 1891. Commerce Commission, emphasizes what has been repeatedly shown: that "of the 200,000 miles [of railroad lines] in the United States, approximately 125,000 miles are controlled by a half-dozen individuals." Shall we not say then that our great railroad magnates, the Goulds, the Vanderbilts, the Hills, the Harrimans and the Huntingtons are Princes of Privilege? If steam railroads are public highways, are not street car lines in the cities, towns and villages of the country in the same sense public highways? Are not all pipe and wire lines through such thoroughfares similarly public highways? Yet in not a single municipality are the street car lines in public hands. Where are the instances in which the telegraph and telephone wires and heat and power pipes are operated by public officials? In all but a very few of the municipalities the electric lighting and power wires are in private hands. In many municipalities the water supply is the business of private, or only quasipublic corporations. Only in the case of sewage piping is there public municipal ownership and operation throughout the country. Hence most of the arterial functions of the body social in our centers of population are in private hands. In a few instances enlightened self-interest swells net receipts by constant improvement in service, but the general policy pursued is to refuse to improve until driven by public pressure. And at all times is practiced with more or less care the art of "getting most feathers with least squawking.” The great value of municipal highway public franchise privileges may be judged from the fact that the annual earnings" of these rights of way in Greater New York, as distinguished from plants and equipments, are conservatively set down by experts at this time at $40,000,000. The combination, merger and absorption principles are, taking all the important communities together, rapidly bringing the public service corporations into fewer and fewer hands. Hence we have the Whitney, the Widener, |