OCR Text |
Show , CONSERVATION. i There are two kinds of eonservstion. The Pin-ehot-Rooaevelt kind may be summed up in a few sentences. The government owns all the ontlying unsurveyed and unsold territory. The government serves the people, hence this property belongs to all the people, and all the people shoulfTsnare in the proceeds of its sale; hence, to prevent rich men from absorbing it, wherever such property is known to exis the government should draw a reserve re-serve around it, until some plan to sell it at ita full value in small lots to poor men is -olvadT . Old Cornelius Vanderbilt was credited with saying that he had one son-in-law who waa more! kjnds of a d d fool than any man that ha had ever seen before. That remark would apply to the above theory were there not something mora t it. That something more ia ita dishonesty. The man in Illinois or Georgia has no more interest in what ia called government property in Utah than baa the man in Utah an interest in .the corn crop of the Illinoia man or the cotton crop of the man in Georgia. The government may take 'all tha property of every man ia the" nation when the defense of the nation reqnirea it. It may go further; it may command the lives of the peopla to the fast man, if ' necessary. ' The government may take the money collected ir. taxea from the people to reforest the watershed of a great rive,r, to prevent damage by floods of thousands of acres of land lower down; but from the first the government has simply held in truxt the unoccupied lands of tha republic, not in trust for aome people who never have aeen and never will see the property, but for auch men aa go to it, occupy and improve it Heretofore the charge put upon auch property to the locator and settler haa been just enough to pay the expenses of survey sur-vey and the making out of the title to the aettler. Thus at first the publie landa were held at $1.23 per acre. - Later, to encourage the settling up f wild lands, homesteads were given settlers. Thus the great Mississippi valley' waa practically given away, the theory being that the land when cultivated culti-vated would in taxea yield the revenue needed by the government The wisdom" of the policy waa never doubted until about all the available1 lands were disposed of and there waa nothing else left the settler but the desert and mountain forest lands. Then there waa hatched a new breed of ' sirtetmen,. r.ho discovered that certain syndicates were obtain'jg titles to large areaa of timber 'lands, coal landa and, since the transmission of power haa been made possible, to water power, and that the government, which meant all tne people. ' was losing uncounted sums. Then the men wtto live on lands which were originally homestead lands, the title to which cost nothing, and the other ' men of fortune whose fortunes started in the same way, all felt aggrieved that they were being robbed by those sharp westerners. Probably if a man will watch outside ef any - achoolhouse in the east he will see perhaps ten boys come out, nine of whom have little fortunes coming to them by inheritance, while the tenth boy will have nothing to depend upon but his brains and his handa. Now, if thia tenth boy ' cornea west, say to Colorado or Wyoming, goea out -. into the desert and finds and locates a coal mine, t- or section of timber or a water power, would any-. any-. one aave a thief say that he ought to divide what he may receive for either property with the nine : boys whom he left at home too comfortably fixed . to have any incentive to go out and hustle t And should he, on the coal mine he might locate in the desert or the timber land he might locate in the mountains, or the water power he found running run-ning to waste, pay any more for either than Americans Ameri-cans hsve been paying for just such things for a century past t The whole system of conservation at practiced of late it not only imbecile, but foolishly dishonest, for none of these properties can be' developed or worked by poor men, and this is so palpable th.tt it looks aa though the whole business wss ar- - ranged in the interest of certain monopolies whi.h are not yet quite ready to art. |