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The people believed that the Star-route scandals, like the whisky frauds, the bogus quarter-master's claims, the public-land seizures, and the steamship subsidy schemes, were "ring" relics of the war, with their profligacy and corruption, on each one of which Colonel Mulberry Sellers would have remarked: "There's millions in it."
To secure the widest distribution of public lands in limited quantities among settlers for residence and cultivation, and thus make the greatest number of individual homes, was the primary object of the public-land legislation in the early days of the Republic. This system was a simple one.
The recommendations of the Secretary of the Interior and the Commissioner of the General Land Office looking to the better protection of public lands and of the public surveys, the preservation of national forests, the adjudication of grants to States and corporations and of private land claims, and the increased efficiency of the public-land service are commended to the attention of Congress.
The attention of the Congress is especially directed to the timber and stone law, the desert-land law, and the commutation clause of the homestead law, which in their operation have in many respects conflicted with wise public-land policy.
The forest reserves themselves are of extreme value to the present as well as to the future welfare of all the western public-land States. They powerfully affect the use and disposal of the public lands. They are of special importance because they preserve the water supply and the supply of timber for domestic purposes, and so promote settlement under the reclamation act.
Let not the reader think for a single moment that we have no appreciation of the labors of a De Witt Clinton, or of a Livingston, that we at all underrate the services of the Eastern capitalists who render available the public-land grants of the West, whether to build ship-canals or railroads.
Experience has shown that in the western States themselves, as well as in the rest of the country, there is widespread conviction that certain of the public-land laws and the resulting administrative practice no longer meet the present needs.
Under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance of the decision.
The energies of the Land Department have been devoted during the present Administration to remedy defects and correct abuses in the public-land service.
The attention of the Congress is especially directed to the timber and stone law, the desert-land law, and the commutation clause of the homestead law, which in their operation have in many respects conflicted with wise public-land policy.
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