OCR Text |
Show The Public Lands. <br><br> It is not often that government commissions are of much value save to the members of them who are enabled to enjoy good living, good salaries and a good deal of pleasant travel at the expense of the Treasury. A notable exception to the rule is furnished, however, by the Land Commission. This Commission appears to have gone about its work in a thorough fashion and to have got hold of the worst evils of the present land system. The reforms which it proposes will, in the main, commend themselves to everyone who is familiar with the Far West. Among these reforms are the abolition of the pre-emption system, which is now perverted so that its chief use is to increase the size of individual holdings; the classification of the public domain into arable, irrigable, pasture, timber, and mineral lands, and the adoption of special regulations for the settlement and sale of each. Three other provisions which the report is said to contain strike us as particularly desirable. One encourages the formation of colonies by permitting homestead settlers to live in a village instead of upon the quarter sections which they own and cultivate; another reserves absolutely the arable land for homestead occupation; and the third protects the scanty forests of the West by providing for the sale of the timber and its removal with a specified time, reserving the land [unreadable line] growth of trees. <br><br> The legislation proposed in regard to mineral lands is also to be commended. It seems to strike squarely at the vices of the present system, under which a man buying a mining claim is pretty sure to buy two or three law-suits. <br><br> The faults of the existing land system mainly grow out of the fact that it was adopted before the vast semi-arid regions of the West and the great mineral districts of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierras were known. It is tolerably well adapted to dealing with the settlement of an almost uniformly fertile country like the prairie States, but it does not fit at all the pastoral belt that lies beyond the strictly arable region, or wooded slopes and gulches of the mountains, or the mining territory, or the narrow strips of valleys that can be made fertile by irrigation. The Commission has wisely set about making such modifications as will encourage the development of the heart of the continent, where other industries than ordinary farming must be resorted to if the country is to support a stable population. - N. Y. Tribune. |