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Argument for Appellants.

"That any person, his heirs or legal representatives, in whose favor the commissioners appointed under the acts of Congress of 1877 and 1878, relative to the Hot Springs of Arkansas, have adjudicated, shall have the sole right to enter and pay for the amount of land the commissioners may have adjudged him entitled to purchase, within eighteen months next after the expiration of the notice required

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40 per centum of the assessed value of said lands as placed thereon by said commissioners."

All titles at Hot Springs are based on the act of June 16, 1880, and not on the act of 1877. The difference between these acts is, that under the act of 1880, the right to purchase the lot comes by a declaration of Congress, and that the persons in whose favor the commissioners have adjudicated shall have the sole right to purchase, while under the other the right to purchase comes from the award of the commissioners.

It is true that the commissioners have adjudicated that certain persons should have the right to purchase the lots in controversy, but it is also true that, after that adjudication, Congress took the whole question of awards under consideration, and by a direct and express enactment declared the appellants should have the sole right to purchase. The question now is, not whether the court can review the awards of the commissioners, but whether it can review and set aside the award of Congress.

If the language of the opinion in the Rector-Gibbon case be read in the light of the facts disclosed by the record, it furnishes no rule of decision for the cases now before the court. But if you take an isolated sentence like this: "Whatever the lessees and those under them did, by way of improvements on the leased premises, inured to the lessor's benefit as absolutely and effectually as though done by himself," and apply it to a case where the improvements, under the lease, were to remain the property of the lessees, you establish a rule of decision that violates the obligation of the contract and takes the property of one man away from him and gives it to another. You turn the act of 1877 into an act of confiscation, instead of that of preëmption.

Argument for Appellants.

If the leases, in the cases now under consideration, had a similar provision to that exhibited in the Rector-Gibbon case, there are many expressions of opinion to be found that would apply to the cases at bar, but there is no such lease. I have a right to assume, and shall assume, that the court intended its language to be confined to the case made by the record, and was not attempting to fix a rule of decision in cases not before. the court.

It is said in the opinion that, "lessees under a claimant or occupant holding the property for him and bound by their stipulation to surrender it on the termination of their lease, stand in no position to claim an adverse and paramount right to purchase. Their possession is his possession." If this sentence be taken as an interpretation of the act, without reference to the facts disclosed by the record, in which the language was used, the appellees could draw some comfort from it; but confine it to a case where the lease gave the improvements to the lessor, and where the right to purchase the lot followed the ownership of the improvements, it furnishes no rule of decision in a case where one claims the lot and where it is adjudged the improvements do not belong to him.

When the court makes use of the expression, "holding the property for him," the word property is used in its broad sense, covering the improvements as well as the lot. It is not used in its narrower sense and confined to the lot itself.

After the 24th of April, 1876, there was no such thing as holding the property for the old claimant, unless the old claimant was the legal or equitable owner of the improvements on the lot. The relation of landlord and tenant was on that day dissolved by the terms of the contract. The title to the property on that day was in the United States, and it soon thereafter took possession by its receiver; and to say that the old tenants of Gaines "held possession for him," while they were attorning to and paying rent to the United States, is to extend the relation of landlord and tenant beyond the confines of known law. Nor is it true, as a proposition of law, that a former tenant could not acquire title from the new landlord.

Argument for Appellants.

Before the 24th of April, 1876, there were two estates; the fee and the leasehold. On that day the fee was declared to be in the United States. On the leasehold were improvements which the lessees, under their lease, had the right to remove, but being fixtures they could not be removed without the assent of the new landlord. If the buildings on the lots had belonged to the lessor, and the old tenant remained in them, I concede that after the passage of the act of 1877, the commissioners should have treated the occupant in the light of one holding over. Not because the relation of landlord and tenant existed during that period, but because the right to purchase the lots was awarded to the former owner of the improvement. The right to the lot, as well as the improvement, had been lost. Congress granted the improvement to the former owner, regardless of past relations.

In the case where the improvement belonged to the lessor, it conferred on him the right to purchase the ground on which the improvement had been made. But if the improvement belonged to another than the lessor, the right to purchase went to him who owned it on the 24th of April, 1876. The right to purchase flows from and is bottomed on an improvement. No improvement, no lot.

The contention of the appellee is, that the possession which the appellant had, of his own house, was the possession of the appellees; that that possession was under a lease from him, and that whatever a donor should elect to present, of right, must go to the landlord. The bald, naked claim is, that, having accepted a lease the term of which expired, the new landlord could not make a present to his old tenant, or give him a right to purchase the land.

The appellee could not avail himself of an improvement made by another unless he was the owner of it.

To give the lots in controversy to Gaines is to give them to one who, the court finds, as a matter of fact, never made any improvement thereon. To give them to Gaines under such a finding, is to disregard the letter and spirit of the statute. To give them to Gaines, is to take from appellants that which the Congress of the United States, by a solemn act, declared

Opinion of the Court.

they should have. To give them to Gaines, is to say that the courts and not Congress have the sole right to dispose of the public domain.

It is apparent, from the language of the act of 1877, that Congress intended that the adjudications of the commissioners should be final, and that this intent is made manifest from following the form of statutes that this court, for more than a quarter of a century, had declared created a board belonging to the political department of the government, and whose adjudications could not be reviewed by the courts.

Mr. Thomas B. Martin and Mr. George W. Murphy filed a brief for the appellant in No. 227, claiming that that case differed from the others in some essential features.

Mr. U. M. Rose (with whom was Mr. G. B. Rose and Mr. R. M. Davies on the brief) for appellees.

MR. CHIEF JUSTICE FULLER, after stating the case, delivered the opinion of the court.

It is unnecessary to enter upon a history of the "Hot Springs litigation," as detailed in Rector v. United States; Hale v. United States; Gaines v. United States, 92 U. S. 698; and Rector v. Gibbon, 111 U. S. 276.

As to the title of the lots in question, we repeat what was said in Lawrence v. Rector, 137 U. S. 139, "that nothing was developed in answer or testimony to disturb the conclusions of law heretofore reached by this court." The argument for appellants has been elaborate and exhaustive, but does not convince us that these cases can be taken out of the rule laid down in Rector v. Gibbon.

The estoppel which prevents a tenant who has acquired possession as such from claiming title adversely to his landlord, does not depend on the validity of his landlord's title. And the assertion in the bills that the right to remove the buildings put upon the lots by the tenants was abandoned, and the fact that, while appellees made improvements upon

Opinion of the Court.

the land claimed by them, they were not shown to have made such on the specific lots, do not affect the operation of the estoppel. Belding's heirs claimed under a paper title, and if there had been no tenants, the improvements made by themselves would have given them the "possessory right of occupation" of the tract within the meaning of the act of Congress; and the tenants cannot be allowed to object that the improvements which they made, and which, strictly speaking, they abandoned by their conduct in the premises, gave them rights superior to their landlord.

The decision of this court in 92 U. S. 698 was rendered April 24, 1876, and the receiver was appointed and took possession of the property for the United States in June of that year. The act of March 3, 1877, "in relation to the Hot Springs reservation in the State of Arkansas," (19 Stat. 377,) creating the commission, provided that "no claim shall be considered which has accrued since the twenty-fourth day of April, eighteen hundred and seventy-six," and referred to claims to the land, or parts thereof, then existing, and not to independent claims acquired thereafter. But there is no merit in the suggestion that George, Henry, and Albert Belding could not lawfully assign their interest in the Belding claim to Gaines after that date, for the language of the act relates to claims that had then accrued, and not to the subsequent acquisition of claims so situated. It may be that after the title was adjudged to be in the United States the tenants could not remove the buildings; but the commissioners found that the buildings belonged to them, and the decrees here gave the value of them to appellants. No appeal was prayed by appellees in this regard and no question arises in respect of it. Inasmuch as the tenants set up claims to the lots in hostility to the leases, they cannot complain of decrees in their favor for the value, and whether under some of the leases the buildings were to become the property of the lessor, while in other cases they might have remained the property of the lessees, does not control the principle upon which Rector v. Gibbon rests. As to the contention that the act of Congress of June 16, 1880, (21 Stat. 288,) was not given due weight because not

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