Railroad). They are interested from the fact that hundreds of them have settled and built in good faith on these lands, believing the grant justly and legally forfeited, and that ultimately they would be able to obtain patents therefor from the Government.

At a regular session, June 5, 1883, of the police jury of East Feliciana, in Louisiana, it was voted that the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Vicksburg Railroad was "a fraudulent concern, which by some adroit impecunious adventurers and speculators organized fifteen years or more ago as a tributary to the Texas Pacific, and never had any vitality except the unlimited cheek of its projectors," and that it was "a collapsed and mythical concern" attempting to transfer its lapsed rights to another company which "has constructed a line of railroad on the western bank of the Mississippi." The meeting appealed to Congress to "nullify this most iniquitous transaction."

This protest of East Feliciana was, on the 12th of June, 1883, read and adopted by the police jury of East Baton Rouge.

On the 4th of August, 1883, the police jury of Franklinton protested against the transfer of any lands in that parish to the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Vicksburg Railroad, or to any other railroad.

With no disposition to reproach our predecessors in these halls, and making all allowances for their overestimates of the real cost of railroads, and their underestimates of the rapidity with which railroads have become directly remunerative, I must express the feeling which is now universal that the grants of land in aid of the construction of railroads have been enormously, I might even say frightfully, excessive. The methods in which these grants have been administered by executive officials have also carried liberality to the verge of downright looseness and waste. Reversing the true rule that grants to private corporations should be construed strictly, and with a careful attention to the limitations and conditions, too many of them seem to have strained every point in favor of the railroads, and to have struggled to find how large an interpretation granting acts would possibly admit of. It is

not in that spirit that the rights of pre-emptors and persons seeking to acquire title under the homestead provisions have been dealt with, but they have been required to bring themselves within not only all the substantial conditions but all the most rigorous formalities prescribed in the laws under which they make their claims.

I do not mean to say that the Interior Department is more rigid than official duty compels it to be in its dealings with individuals and in its requirements from pre-emptors and homestead settlers and others of strict and formal proof of the most complete and technical compliance with all the conditions of the acts of Congress before patents are issued. Nevertheless it is true that individual cases are hung up for months, until anything lacking which ingenuity can hold to be a necessary link in the chain of evidence is supplied; but in the case of great railroad corporations, demanding millions and tens of millions of acres, everything seems to be presumed in their favor; no inquisition is made into the regularity of transactions in the most vital particulars, and where two constructions are possible the one giving the widest scope to grants seems to be invariably preferred. In this case the continued legal existence of the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Vicksburg Railroad Company, notwithstanding the repeal of its charter years ago by the Legislature of Louisiana, was assumed on the mere ground of a judgment obtained without argument and rendered without reasons in a subordinate United States court, and which, however obtained, was and is binding to nobody but the parties to it.

So also the sufficiency of the deed of the Barnums, father and son, was assumed on no other basis than an authorizing vote of the directors of the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Vicksburg Company, and without the least inquiry either as to whether the directors themselves had the power, which they manifestly had not, to make such a wholesale transfer of everything which the company possessed, or as to whether, if they had such a power, they could legally delegate it to anybody else. So also no investigation was made of the

questions whether the organization of the New Orleans, Baton Rouge and Vicksburg Company had been regularly kept up or whether the ratification meeting of the stockholders in December, 1881, was duly called and contained the necessary quorum of bona fide stockholders. And from first to last no opportunity has been afforded by a reference to the Court of Claims or otherwise for a presentation of the legal points in favor of the rights of the United States or of the pre-emption and homestead rights of actual settlers as against the claiming railroad company, while the fullest hearing has been accorded to the elaborated arguments of the many eminent lawyers whom the company has the means and the sufficient inducement to employ.

It is to be regretted that more of that care and caution which has been exercised in giving patents for quartersections of land had not been shown in giving patents to railroads for areas exceeding those of powerful European monarchies. It may be useless to regret the past, but it is clearly time to call a halt in loose grants and equally loose constructions of grants of the public domain to corporations which are private in their ownership, control and profit, however useful the enterprises in which they are engaged may be to the country.

Mr. President, I now ask to have the bill referred to the Committee on Public Lands.

THE QUESTION OF THE HOUR.

Address delivered at Leadville, Colorado, before the Y. M. C. A., on Thursday evening, April 12, 1888.

There are many intelligent persons who believe, or profess to believe, that the chief danger which menaces the security of private property comes from the classes commonly described as socialists or communists.

However possible it may be that there is some foundation for that view of the case in respect to a few countries in Europe, there is absolutely none in respect to this country.

Where expression of opinion is so completely free, as it is in the United States, we may expect to hear opinions of all kinds. We have among us some theorists who advocate the abrogation of individual ownership of land, and still others who advocate a general per capita distribution, or at any rate, an equal per capita enjoyment of all the property of the world.

Such idiosyncrasies are not original with this age, but have always commended themselves to a certain class of minds and have been much more common at former periods than at the present time.

It is not improbable that much of the alarm which has been felt on this account has been fostered for the purpose of diverting attention from the real danger.

In these days, and especially in this country, spoliations of property are in no appreciable degree threatened by socialists and communists. That danger menaces us from an entirely different quarter. It is not dreamers who wish all property to be held in common that we need fear, but those who seek to increase their share of the world's goods through crafty and unscrupulous manipulations of the legislative and sometimes of the executive and even the judicial departments

of the Government. Of the spoliations of this latter class, the greatest in amount and the most wide reaching, are made possible by the careless or corrupt granting of such excessive privileges to railroad, telegraph, water, gas and similar companies as to enable them to exact unequal and oppressive charges for the services which they render to the public, and by the careless or corrupt neglect to enforce against such companies the powers of regulation of which legislators can never divest themselves or their successors.

This thing has gone so far that it is probably true, although exact accuracy in such matters is not attainable, that the whole amount of the national taxation in this country is exceeded by the sums annually taken from the people by monopolies of various kinds, the exactions of which can not be escaped until there is a radical reform in the spirit and methods of legislation.

The proportions of the mischief are enormous. It is the chiefest and crying evil of the times, and it would be an affront to the intelligence of the country to suppose that the consideration of appropriate and efficient remedies will not soon become the foremost topic of political discussion.

The monopolies which were in former times chiefly complained of in English history were the special grants, sometimes by Parliament but commonly by the Crown, to particular persons or companies of the exclusive right to engage in certain branches of commerce or manufacture, whereby they were enabled to exact exorbitant prices from all who dealt with them. Such grants have been rarely made in England since the final expulsion of the Stuarts in 1688, although several of them have continued in existence to much later periods. A conspicuous monopoly, that of the trade of the Indies by the East India Company,' was not broken up until 1814.

Patents and copyrights, for limited terms to inventors and authors, are known in the practice of European governments and are especially authorized in the Constitution of the United States. They make a case sui generis, and are