OCR Text |
Show and haw judges have proved untrue to their oaths of office, and that is this: Within the lost few years there has been an awakening of the public conscience, and while a complete halt has not been called, yet there has come about a greater demand that our public servants, particularly those on the bench, be worthy of the trust reposed and that powerful corporations be made to obey one or two of the ten commandments, including the third, -'Thou shalt not steal." jl BEFORE THE PEOPLE WERE AWAKENED. l! Hampton's Magazine is presenting a number of remarkable articles on the exploitation of the west by the great railroad interests, in-terests, written by Charles Edward Russell, which are eye-openers ' : in that they tell of fraud and trickery, and even court turpitude, al- ! most beyond belief. In his last article, Mr. Russell deals with the jj men who were at the head of the old Central Pacific railroad, in ; which he says: j! On pretense that they would build a railroad, the Central Pa- i cific people gathered from the United States a land grant for build- j ing a railroad from Roseville, eighteen miles north of Sacramento, ! : to Portland Oregon. j "This grant," Mr. Russell says, "was of every alternate twenty ;j square miles (ten on each side of the track) conditioned upon the ;l building of the road the entire distance.- The congenial four built only as far as Redding, 152 miles, but they took possession of the j land grant for the entire projected line of the road, "In the election of 1882, Mr. Barclay Henley, a young attorney J of Santa Rosa, California, who had studied the land grant question, was nominated for Congress on a platform demanding that the for-feited for-feited land grants should be returned to the public domain. On this j; issue he was elected and promptly introduced bills for the reclama tion of the forfeited grants of the Roseville-Portland line, for the j reclamation of . the forfeited land grants of the Northern Pacific j colossal grabs that have somehow escaped the attention they de- j serve and some other bills having similar objects, j In the Senate these bills were promptly buried, nor could any argument or appeal ever resurrect them! The four congenial gen-; gen-; tlemen remaind in possssion of the land to which they were not en- li titled. jj "About fifteen yearrs ago," he continues, "the need of consjr- vation began to be forced, very tardily, upon our attention by the Jj obvious fact that we should shortly be without timber as without j public lands. Congress, therefore, set apart regions as inalienable ; forest reserves for the nation. An honest man in the Senate, look- , ing over the project, saw that while its main features were admir- jl able, it contained one defect easily remedied. It did not provide j for the cases of men that had settled upon the land sequestered for jl public purposes. That is to say, in the middle of a reserve a set- I! tier might be tilling a farm, and by the establishing of a forest i reserrve about him might find himself utterly cut off from com- j munication with the rest of the world, whereby his farm would be made valueless. "This senator, therefore, introduced a measure providing that j any dwellers on the land taken for forest reserves should have the j right to exchange their farms for an equal amount of public land jl elsewhere. This just and reasonable amendment fell into the hands j of an eminent friend of the Interests in the Senate and another in j the House. They changed the words 'dwellers on" to 'holders of 'j and, at the last minute before the end of the session, it was rushed Ij through the Senate, giving no chance for amendment. !! "The railroad companies immediately took advantage of this J provision. They gave up fifty millions of acres of worthless bar- i; rens m Nevada and Arizona where nothing ever grew, or ever would jj grow, but cactu or sage brush, and received in exchange choice tim- II ber lands in Oregon, Northern California, and Washington, nor j. could any protest or outcry avail to check this monstrous fraud, ij "Only by a narrow margin did they fail of getting those inval- ! uablo coal deposits in Alaskahat are now the subject of .a national controversy. They had planned to gratf all om entry. When the railroad company found that it was beaten off from Alaska, the j timber tract was as opportunely restored to entry and the railroad ji companies filed for and grabbed it ail about 50,000,000 acres. I ji suggest that the next Conservation Conference in this country devote j itself to this little fact." There is one encouraging thought which comes from reading I, tow the big money interests in the past have defrauded the public ; ! i i |