Show GUILFORD JHLLEIlS CASE Great efforts arc being made to break the force of President Clevelands letter to Secretary Lamar on the case of Guil ford Miller homesteader It has made he Socialists furious and driven tho Republicans Re-publicans half out of their senses The first because their blatant land agitation cries will be bereft of half of their cant and slush and the second because they see how by it tho President has so immeasurably im-measurably strengthened his position be fore the masses of the people Each in its place attacks it from tho same identical standpoint of selfishness and greed Each uses pretty nearly the samo weapon Each delares that the letter is only upplicahlo to the one single caso in question and that upon the prin ciple that a single swallow does not miiko a Bummer this single communi cation should not make the President KO popular in tho eyes of tho toiling masses of tho people all over tho Unite States Let us see about this The Attorney General declares that the Miller case is 1 only one of a great number of cases So does the Secretary of the Interior So does the Commissioner of the General Land Office And so better than all does Cleveland the indomitable himself him-self Since 1801 and up to the election of Cleveland the administration of the Public Land Office of the Government had been simply infamous Settlers were excluded from vast bodies of public land such land being held for the use and benefit of subsidized corporations The public domain instead of being looked upon as a sacred reserve fund only to bedrawn against in the name of honest homesteading was lavished upon companies of speculators as bribes for building railroads in advance of any demand de-mand for them It is even yet scarcely possible to recognize to its fullest extent the criminal idiocy of such waste and pillage much less to foresee all the fruits he country is just now beginning to reap from such an evil As insane however as was the policy of granting vast empires of public territory terri-tory to speculative railroad projects it was more criminally insane still to attempt at-tempt to lock up for their future accommodation accom-modation and aggrandizement other vast I empires under the name of indemnity lands It is these lands which the President is after It was on these lands that Guilford Guil-ford Miller preempted a homestead The original land grants themselves were made under the forms of law j the indemnity grants without even a shadow or a prettiiihe of a form of law There never has been any law requiring or justifying jus-tifying the exclusion of settlers fiom public lands of any sort outside of the limits of tho railway grants Even order for such exclusion was made without with-out law at the instance of the land grabbing corporations and by untrustworthy untrust-worthy administrators of the Interior Department De-partment acting in the service of those corporations Within the past fifteen years more than one hundred million acres beyond the limit of any land grant have been closed against the honest land seeker to serve the views of the corporate land crabber One hundred millions Just stop leap enough to think what an immense territory terri-tory this is Its equivalent in square miles is 156559 an actual area of ground as large as California or as the six New England States of Maine New Hampshire Hamp-shire Vermont Rhode Island Massachusetts Massa-chusetts and Connecticut together with the three States of New York New Jersey Jer-sey and Pennsylvania in addition From this enormous extent of public territory wholly outside of any railway land l grant or any pretense whatever of any railway land grant the people have been excluded by their own servants and without tho least direction or authority author-ity of law Only those who are able to realize the signification of those tremendous tremen-dous facts can grasp the full import oho o-ho I Presidents letter of instruction to the Minister of the Interior As JoujinissionerSparks truly declares Guilford Millers case was only Omit among many that have proven the iniquity in-iquity of fhis land robbing system Thousands of other men equally deserving de-serving have been placed by it in th same situation In a single county in the Columbia river territory there are no less than twelve hundred citizens whose homesteads the Northern Pacific lane pirates are trying to steal or confiscate Not a settler on land worth occupying within twentyfive leagues of a subsidized subsi-dized railway has been free from this I menace In the majority of cases settlers who have acquired imlisputabk rights in law to the land they occupied have been forced either to buy their homes of the railway company on lands to which that company had not and perhaps per-haps never would have the least color ol title or to Buffer eviction by the mandate of the national land office at the instance i of that subsidied corporation Moreover the manner of withdrawing these immense bodies of indemnity land was as imperially autocratic as the ukase of a Czar A simple blue pencil Hm drawn on a map by a railroad attorney was all that was necessary If a settle should happen to locate anywhere within the limits of this prescribed territory he was put upon in every imaginable way worried annoyed threatened and s < o continuously bedeviled and so put into ho water that he fled finally from his preemption pre-emption in mortal fear If afterward however the location of the railway was changed a new blue pencil line drawn by the ubiquitous attorney marked l tlie boundary line of a new indemnity belt but did not erase the previous one no the previous order of the subsidized thief who was acting for the subsidized interior department Thus more than threefourths of Oregon Ore-gon and Washington Territory have been in a state of reservation caused by the filing of different railway maps not one E of which was ever adopted as a final location lo-cation of the road And yet for these withdrawals of indemnity belts amount ing in Dakota alone to more than 1115 000 acres there never has been the passage pas-sage of one single statutory law whatever Hence the mighty import of the Cleve land letter and hence the wonderful force with which it is now appealing to the hearts of the laboring classes all over the country The President has declared in words that cannot be explained away nor misunderstood that the indemnity lands aro open to actual settlers j that not one acre of them is owned by any railway rail-way corporation and that whoever settles set-tles upon them in good faith shall be protected pro-tected in his rights by the whole power if need be of the United States Is it any wonder therefore that dry bones are shaking Kansas City Times |