With authors they pursue a more liberal course. They say: "We have
extensive fields in which hundreds of thousands of men have labored for
many centuries. They were at first wild lands, as wild as those of the
neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains, but this vast body of laborers has
felled the trees and drained the swamps, and has thus removed nearly all
the difficulties that stood opposed to profitable cultivation. They have
also' opened mines of incalculable richness; mines of gold, silver, lead,
copper, iron, and other metals, and all of these are common property. The
men who executed these important works were our slaves, ill fed, worse
clothed, and still worse lodged; and thousands of the most laborious and
useful of them have perished of disease and starvation. Great as are the
improvements already made, their number is constantly increasing, for we
continue to employ such slaves--active, intelligent, and useful men--
in extending them, and scarcely a day elapses that does not bring to light
some new discovery, tending greatly to increase the value of _our common
property_. We invite you, gentlemen, to come and cultivate these lands and
work these mines. They are free to all. During the long period of
forty-two years you shall have the whole product of your labor, and all we
shall ask of you, at the close of that period, will be that you leave
behind the common property of which we are now possessed, increased by the
addition of such machinery as you may yourselves have made. The corn that
you may have extracted, and the gold and silver that you may have mined
during that long period, will be the property of yourselves, your wives,
and your children. We charge no rent for the use of the lands, no wages
for the labor of our slaves." Not satisfied with this, however, the
persons who work these rich fields and mines claim to be absolute owners,
not only of all the gold and silver they extract, but of all the machinery
they construct out of the common property; and out of this claim grows the
treaty now before the Senate.