miniscence, produce a few passages from Franklin's writings. He says, in reply to an inquiry, as to the chances of an emigrant to the American States, in 1780:

"With regard to encouragements for strangers from American governments, they are really only what are derived from good laws and liberty. Strangers are welcome, because there is room enough for them all. . . . Government does not at present, whatever it may have done in former times, hire people to become settlers, by paying their passage, giving land, negroes, utensils, stock, or any other kind of emolument whatsoever; inshort, America is the land of labor." . . . "Land being cheap, from the vast forests still void of inhabitants, and not likely to be occupied in an age to come, insomuch that the property of a hundred acres of fertile soil, full of wood, may be obtained near the frontiers in many places for eight or ten guineas (forty to fifty dollars), hearty young laboring men, who understand the husbandry of corn and cattle, which is nearly the same in that country as in Europe, may easily establish themselves there. A little money, saved of the good wages they receive there, while they work for others, enables them to buy the land and begin their plantation."... "The writer of this has known several instances of large tracts of land bought on what was then the frontiers of Pennsylvania for ten pounds per hundred acres, which, after twenty years, when the settlement had been extended far beyond them, sold readily without improvement for three pounds per acre.'

"Many persons have proposed to go over on condition of having their passages paid, lands given, salaries appointed, exclusive privileges for a term of years, &c. Such persons, on reading the Articles of Confederation, will find, that the Congress have no power committed to them, or money put in their hands, for such purposes, and that if any such encouragement is given, it must be by the government of some separate state. This, however, has been rarely done in America; and when it has been done, has rarely succeeded. . . . Poor persons working for small wages are to be found in Europe, but will not be found in America, till all the lands are taken up and cultivated, and the excess of people, who cannot get land, want employment."

Franklin had obviously no objection to cheap land prices for actual settlers, but he was opposed to hiring folks to settle by giving them lands, &c. He foresaw, that the economic reaction of American society upon itself would not take effect, as long as lands were open for settlement. The consequences of allowing land purchases on speculation, and thus affording opportunities to make fortunes by raising the price of land for actual

settlers, he seems neither to have fully considered, nor reflected upon. He speaks in another part of the same essay of men who are mere fruges consumere nati, or, as Watts has it—

"... men born

Merely to eat up corn;"

"and," Franklin adds, "otherwise good for nothing, till by their deaths their estates, like the carcass of the negro's gentleman hog,1 come to be cut up." The philosopher of America regarded such men a remote probability in his country; yet to our personal knowledge they were bred largely, within fifty years of his essay, through land speculations, and they have obstructed America's true development to a great extent. He would be astounded were he to come back to-day.

How long a superficial view of a public question may sway public judgment may be seen from the speech made by Governor Hubbard, of Texas, at the Centennial in Philadelphia.

said:

He

"It has always been the policy of Texas to encourage a liberal system of education. Early in the history of the republic, in 1836, there was ample provision made for common schools and for one great state university. Of our public domain there has been surveyed and set apart, more than a quarter of a century ago, for a state university, 221,400 acres; for each county in the state, 17,712 acres. We have 168 organized counties, thus giving to the counties for free schools over twenty millions of acres. The older counties located their lands years ago, and they are now in the settled sections of the state, and worth $3, 50c. per acre, or $61,992 to each county. At present rates, the university lands, at the same figures, are worth the princely sum of $749,000. In a few more years this splendid endowment, made by the early patriots of Texas, will become millions of dollars."

"In addition to this, each alternate section granted to railroads is reserved for the school fund, and, by the present Constitution, one-half of all the public lands, and one-fourth of all the general revenues, are solemnly set apart for a perpetual fund for common free schools for the children of Texas. The number of acres of our public school lands will now approximate twenty million acres-worth over thirty millions of dollars. By the late Constitutional Convention of Texas, there has, in addition, been granted to the university one million more of acres of the

This relates to an anecdote he loved to tell of a negro, who said: "Bocarrora (white man) make de black man workee, make de horse workee, make de ox workee, make ebery ting workee, only not de hog."

public lands. Under wise legislation, our unrivalled school fund will furnish a basis for the free education of every child in Texas. She dispenses this bounty in no spirit of caste, party, or section. All races may bring their children to drink at this fountain."

Here is one of the better state governors actually bragging of the magnificent wastefulness of his state! He calls a thing a "fountain" that is a cask wasting at the spigot, as well as at the bunghole, and leaky generally! He talks of "wise legislation," when really nothing is done except a fine opportunity thrown away. Had Texas kept her 175 million acres of land to herself, when annexed to the Union, and she might in time have realized 1750 million dollars from them, and built the railroads herself, for which she is now borrowing money in all kinds of slip-shod ways, and is even now importuning the federal government for interest guarantees. The governor's boasting over the fact, that Texas is the most unwise of all the governments that have had to deal with large public domains in modern times, and that she is still pursuing an error begun 250 years previous, in the colonial misconduct of European rulers, reminds us of an instance of the length of time which wrong-doing may keep hold of men's minds, when it is not critically inquired into. We refer to the plaudits still paid to the course pursued by Joseph in the Egyptian famine. Surely he only abused his power, when he changed the freeholds of the people into feudal tenures, subject to one-fifth of all the products of the lands as rent. For three millenniums has this perfidious " opposite extreme of our way of treating the lands of a people" been extolled as great financial wisdom and statesmanship. It may well be used as an argument, that we should be lenient on the thoughtless procedures in America, that have only had a run of 250 years!

Looking back, then, over the whole field, it seems obvious to us, that wild lands at low prices without the organisms, methods, and measures, which civilized governments owe to their people, such as good means of intercommunication, is not only offering them a poor chance, but is the very least that can be expected. On the other hand, we hold, that tendering to folks lands on even high terms of payment, if they include provisions for an enhancing and civilizing human existence, and the means for a high social development, is a way worthy of a great national government. Keep the lands for those who will till and preserve them; never intrust them to corporations, special public bodies, or feudal lordships. Sell them to actual settlers; but retain for society, and its national political organs, the supreme

power to make laws-as to rights of way, forests, watercourses, general health, personal safety, and the metals in the soil, and to enforce them. Expend the proceeds of the sales upon a good far-seeing financial policy for public purposes, and especially in establishing centres of trade. We say centres, for the most costly folly of nations has been their penchant for one large emporium. With a choice of markets and roads, what is taken from the people, is returned to them impregnated with political wisdom; while the other way it is taken from them by middle men, or special interests, and acts as a dead weight on society. That the west made progress, in spite of the fallacious disposition of the public lands, only proves the immensity of the public resources that were misdirected and misdistributed. Too much of the wealth on which we felicitate ourselves, and which swells our census tables, inured to private persons undeservedly. Lowering the prices at government land sales, did not lower them to the permanent inhabitants of the west. They paid a profit to the first purchasers, and were to that extent less able to bear the hardships of pioneer life. Had the United States received these sums and expended them for public purposes, and every family in the land would have enjoyed the elevating influences thus engendered. Society would not only have been land rich, but wealthy in the highest and best sense of the word.

CHAPTER XXII.

THE NORTH AMERICAN INDIAN.

"Free people do not want peace, but victories.”—Guizot, Life of Washington.

WE may as well admit, that it is much easier to criticize conduct, than to frame a policy or to direct events; but while this admission warns us to be modest in our opinions, it does not dispense with the duty to use history and its experiences for instruction. And the great lesson we learn, in taking a comprehensive view of the fate of the North American Indian, is that all the errors and crimes, that are involved in it, had their source in founding political conduct on religions or morals that had really no application to the questions to be solved. The presumption, that the wish to spread a special European Christianity and civilization, in America, furnished the justification for treating the aborigines, who did not readily fall in with this purpose, as enemies and aliens in their own native land, was certainly wrong, if not criminal. America saw the principle that was thus violated, when, 170 years after the first settlements in North America, its people asserted their right to form their own political institutions, as well as religions and morals, from the standpoint of their own permanent interests, and by the light of their own experience, wisdom, and virtue.

Why the Indian never received the benefit of the Declaration of Independence? Why he was the only ward of the nation, and the tender object of its religious fervor, without anybody objecting to it? Why he alone was never considered included in the guarantees of the Constitution? These questions present anomalies, which perplex the more, the closer they are examined. The quotation from Guizot at the head of this chapter offers the only explanation, to wit: For ourselves we wanted liberty, over the Indian victories. What the Indian did to the wild animals in the forest, we did to him. So we presumed we had a right to kill him, and to treat him as the